Grace Ogot could be considered one of Africa´s finest writers. She has a splendid writing style in how she evokes vivid images and captures like no one else the formalities of African tradition and interpersonal relationships that are governed by significant protocols and symbolisms.

She was born in Kenya in 1930. She worked as a nurse in Uganda and England, as a journalist, she supervised BBC Foreign Service programmes and she was an executive at ‘Air India Corporation of East Africa’. Ogot has also held a number of diplomatic positions, she has represented her country at the United Nations and UNESCO, and she is a founding member of the ‘Writers' Association of Kenya’.

She is also the first Kenyan writer to receive international recognition and the first to be published by East African Publishing House.

The first book she had published was ‘Land without Thunder’, a collection of stories about rural life in Kenya.

Her first novel was ‘The Promised Land’ (1966), which narrates the life of Nyapol and her husband Ochola, a farming couple of the Luo tribe, one of the protagonists in Kenya´s independence, who immigrate to Tanzania. In 1980, she published her second novel, The Graduate, which narrates the tribulations of a young student who returns to Kenya after studying in the United States.

Many of her stories take place with the scenic background of Lake Victoria and the traditions of the Luo tribe. Her prose is evocative of traditional folklore, such as The Strange Bride, a novel about a mystical and provocative woman in the ancient land of Luo.

Grace Ogot also addresses the topic of emigration, such as in ‘The Promised Land’, a novel that takes place in 1930 and in which the main characters immigrate from Nyanza to northern Tanzania in search of wealth and fertile land. ‘The Graduate’ is a novel about the complexities of emigration through the main character´s return to Kenya after studying in the United States.

Ogot has published works in English as well as Luo. In fact, some of her works have first been published in Luo, her native language, as is the case of many of the short stories in ‘Land without Thunder’.