Hello there. I'm Khaddafina: a sometimes vocalist and erstwhile violinist and sound engineer. Principally, I'm a writer of fiction whose work revolves around the daily weather of women’s lives. Sometimes this weather consists of the private forces of the day-to-day – the minutiae, the personal joys & defeats, the often-fraught intimacies between people, the struggles between old selves and new. And at other times, these forces are great and impersonal: patriarchy, colonialism, the silences of the historical record, and the habitations of the supernatural in an earthly world. Usually, these women are well-educated, prosperous, well-travelled, and so they happen to represent a subset of Africans not commonly found in published literature. But I find this demographic to be as fascinating as any other, their lives as varied and cornucopian, as worthy of that Updikean pursuit of ‘giving the mundane its beautiful due’.

Some things I love or frequently ponder: history, elephants, primates, ranunculus, Schubert, motown, jazz; my girlfriends, my nieces and nephews, autumn, garlic, coffee; the opacity & translucence of Jesus Christ; the mountains of Kigezi, the blue of the Ionian Sea.

Presently, I am wrapping up a story collection and working on a novel. To read my work and to get a more concrete idea of its flavour, go here. Outside of writing, I spend some of my time running The June Consultancy, where I offer editorial and manuscript consultations.