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Kakwenza Rukirabashaija

Kakwenza Rukirabashaija is a Ugandan lawyer and award-winning novelist who has suffered repeated imprisonment and torture for authoring social protest literature against dictatorship in his country. He is a practitioner of “radical rudeness,” an activist tactic with roots in Uganda’s anti-colonial resistance movement and his books include the satirical novel The Greedy Barbarian, about corruption in a fictional country, and two memoirs from his imprisonment and torture in 2020 and 2021: Banana Republic: Where Writing is Treasonous, and The Savage Avenger. His writings have received international acclaim, including the PEN Pinter Prize in 2021, a shortlisting for the Václav Havel Library Foundation’s Disturbing Peace Award in 2022 and the Human Rights Foundation’s Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in 2023.

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