1. Ber Anena born and previously published as Harriet Anena is a Ugandan writer and performer, whose writing includes poetry, nonfiction and fiction.
15 Facts About Harriet Anena
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Harriet Anena is the author of a collection of poems, A Nation In Labour, published in 2015, won the 2018 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.
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Harriet Anena grew up during the two-decade war led by the Lord's Resistance Army rebels, an episode that birthed and influenced her early writing.
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Harriet Anena attended Gulu Public Primary School, Sacred Heart Secondary School, and Gulu Central High School.
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Harriet Anena graduated with a Bachelor of Mass Communication degree from Makerere University in 2010 and completed a Master of Arts degree in human rights from the same institution in 2018.
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Harriet Anena is pursuing the MFA Writing program at Columbia University in New York.
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Harriet Anena worked with the Daily Monitor newspaper as a reporter, sub-editor, and deputy chief sub-editor from 2009 to September 2014.
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Harriet Anena joined the African Centre for Media Excellence in 2014 and worked as a journalism trainer, media researcher, program coordinator and online content producer until 2019.
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Harriet Anena has taught Specialized Writing to journalism students at Islamic University in Uganda.
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Harriet Anena wrote her first poem, "The plight of the Acholi child", in 2003.
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Harriet Anena attended the 2013 Caine Prize workshop held in Uganda, and her story "Watchdog Games" was published in the anthology A Memory This Size and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing, 2013.
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Harriet Anena's work appears in 2019's New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent, edited by Margaret Busby.
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In December 2018, Harriet Anena was named winner of the 2018 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa for her book A Nation in Labour, published in 2015.
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Harriet Anena jointly won the prize with Professor Tanure Ojaide.
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Harriet Anena received her award at a ceremony in Lagos, Nigeria, attended by Wole Soyinka, Africa's first Nobel Laureate in literature, after whom the prize is named.