Lauri Kubuitsile is a full time writer living in Botswana. She has written numerous books over many genres for children, teens, and adults which are published both in Southern Africa and abroad. Her short stories have been published around the world in anthologies and magazines. She also writes regularly for South Africa’s FunDza Literacy Trust which makes stories available to young adults on their cellphones. View her stories here.
Lauri has won or been shortlisted for numerous writing prizes. In 2007, she won the Botswana Ministry of Youth and Cultures’ Botswerere prize for Creative Writing. In 2008, she won The Bessie Head Literature Prize for Short Story. She won the Pan-African Golden Baobab Prize for children’s literature, twice, in 2009 and 2010, and was shortlisted for the prestigious 2011 Caine Prize for her story In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata. Her humorous teen book, Signed, Hopelessly in Love, was chosen by O Magazine as one of the best books from 2011; the sequel is now available from Diamond Educational Publishers titled Signed, The Secret Keeper. Signed, Hopelessly in Love was also shortlisted for South Africa’s MER Prize in September 2012.
Her books are read in schools in Botswana, both at primary and secondary level, and are now also read in South African schools with her humorous book, The Second Worst Thing, and her historical fiction, Curse of the Gold Coins, having been recently CAPS approved for grade 7.
She has attended numerous literary festivals where she ran workshops, sat on panels, and gave talks including: The Space for Thought Festival at the London School of Economics, Storymoja Hay Festival in Nairobi, Kenya, and The Time of the Writer Festival in Durban, South Africa. She writes a weekly column in one of Botswana's national newspapers, The Voice, about writing, books and the literary scene on the continent. It can be found online here.
Lauri blogs at Thoughts from Botswana
Her latest book, The Scattering, is a historcial novel about the genocide of the Herero people and will come out in May 2016, published by Penguin Random House South Africa.
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A murder mystery set in Botswana, part of the Kate Gomolemo Mysteries series.
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