The Witness of Nina Mvungi is a collection of seven stories by contemporary Swahili writer Esther Karin Mngodo translated by the award winning Translator from the Swahili, Jay Boss Rubin. It is the first full-length book of fiction by award-winning contemporary Tanzanian author Esther Karin Mngodo. Its seven stories, translated from Swahili, range in style from lyrical realism to speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. The stories all share a distinct voice and focus on the feminine, and some are linked not just thematically but in terms of plot. Whether depicting a world of spirits behind the proverbial curtain, a dystopian future in which the sun is about to expire, or a sweltering-hot present-day fish market, Mngodo's tantalizing fiction pushes beyond allegory and didacticism into the rich ambiguity of lived experience. She portrays intimate encounters between a wide variety of characters with compassion and wit, paying particular attention to class and gender dynamics. Some of her stories appear to turn on secrets suddenly revealed—but more than plot resolution, they rely on mutual entanglement.
Jay Boss Rubin is the winner of the 2024 Loose Translation Award, a collaboration betrween CUNY Queens and Hanging Loose Press. An award winning translator from the Swahili, Rubin has been a Swahili instructor at Hofstra University and Union College; freelance Swahili interpreter working with Queens Criminal Court, U.S. District Court (Eastern District of New York), UN Commission on the Status of Women; Label Head, Voodoo Doughnut Recordings; event organizer. His other translations inclue the novel Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi (Yale University Press, 2025) and he was a contributing translator to No Edges: Swahili Stories (Two Lines Press,2023).
Esther Karin Mngodo was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1986. Bilingual in Swahili and English, she works across genres and languages as a fiction writer, poet, translator, journalist, editor and feminist publisher. In 2014, Mngodo was the winner of the inaugural Ebrahim Hussein Poetry Prize, one of Tanzania's major literary awards. Her prose writing has been featured in The Goddess of Mtwara and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2017, Imbiza Journal, The Citizen, The Chanzo and other publications. She is the author of the poetry collection Jinsi ya Kurudi Nyumbani (How to Return Home), and the founder and publisher of UMBU, an online literary journal for women who write in Swahili. Esther is also an Open Society Fellow. She lives in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with her daughter, Jasmine.
"These seven short stories conjure up the whole gamut of human existence. They are serious, joyful, painful, and deeply feminine. There is poetry, politics, culture, and class here. The writing has a familiar cadence to it, a sense that every word is intimate to the writer, and it's being employed to exactness. There is no trace of language pretense. I read the short stories in their translated language, English, from Kiswahili, and can feel the musicality of the original language and its adopted language's success at capturing it." — Lidudumalingani Mqombothi, Winner of the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing
