Name Moraa Gitaa | Role Novelist | |
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Books Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, Shifting Sands | ||
Moraa Gitaa is a Kenyan novelist living in Nairobi. She is the author of the novels Shifting Sands and Crucible for Silver & Furnace for Gold. Gitaa was one of the Kenya Chapter winners of the 2014 Burt Award for African Literature and nominated for the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writing and also won First Prize in the National Book Development Council of Kenya (NBDCK) Adult Fiction literary award in 2008 (Kenya's National Book Week Literary Award.) She is a member of PEN International, the World Association of Writers.
Career
Gitaa's first full-length novel, Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, centres on two characters: Lavina, an African woman living with HIV, and Giorgio, an Italian man whom Lavina meets on vacation. Gitaa's second novel is Shifting Sands. Gitaa's recent work is a crime fiction novella, Hila, YA Burt Award-winning title The Shark Attack!, and children's book, The Con Artiste.
Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold has been described by reviewers as a re-reading and re-writing of gender in times of HIV. Her work on Shifting Sands received a positive review in the Nairobi Star from Khainga O' Okwemba, who said: "Here is a writer with the patience, perseverance and discipline needed to create vivid characters. Here is a contemporary Kenyan writer capable of bedazzling and cajoling the reader with a skillfully written and scintillating narrative.... Shifting Sands is a must read for literature students." Gitaa's stories focus on vulnerable and typically marginalized members of contemporary African society, such as those afflicted with HIV.
She has been featured in anthologies including Author-Me Author Africa Anthology (2011), Author-Me Author Africa Anthology (2008), and G21 The World's Magazine – Africa Fresh! New Voices from the First Continent (2007).
She has published a number of short stories that include "Searching Me", "Katsanga Kenye", "The Devil is in the Detail", "To Serenity via Perdition", "Diplomatic Impunity", "Obscure Oddities", "From Shifting Sands to Deeper Dimensions". Gitaa is currently working on a semi-autobiography/ inspirational book and one on Dyslexia.
Gitaa is the apexart NYC fellow, from 28 February to 29 March 2017.