WRITERS from Uganda

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Ugandan Writers of all time. This list of famous Ugandan Writers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Irshad Manji (b. 1968)

With an HPI of 36.34, Irshad Manji is the most famous Ugandan Writer.  Her biography has been translated into 26 different languages on wikipedia.

Irshad Manji (born 1968) is a Ugandan-born Canadian educator. She is the author of The Trouble with Islam Today (2004) and Allah, Liberty and Love (2011), both of which have been banned in several Muslim countries. She also produced a PBS documentary in the America at a Crossroads series, titled Faith Without Fear, which was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. A former journalist and television presenter, Manji is an advocate of a reformist interpretation of Islam and a critic of literalist interpretations of the Qur'an. Her latest book, Don't Label Me (2019), proposes methods on how to heal political, racial, and cultural divides. The ideas in the book are related to the Moral Courage Project, which Manji founded at New York University in 2008 and expanded to the University of Southern California (USC) in 2016, when she was a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy. After leaving USC, she founded Moral Courage College with the goal of teaching "young people how to engage honestly about polarizing issues rather than shaming or canceling each other". Manji lectures on these themes as a senior research fellow with the Oxford Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights.

2. Simon Kuper (b. 1969)

With an HPI of 33.20, Simon Kuper is the 2nd most famous Ugandan Writer.  His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Simon Kuper is a British, and naturalized French, author and journalist, best known for his work at the Financial Times and as a football writer. After studies at Oxford, Harvard University and the Technische Universität Berlin, Kuper started his career in journalism at the FT in 1994, where he today writes about a wide range of topics, such as politics, society, culture, sports and urban planning. He publishes a well-read column in the weekend edition FT Magazine and has twice been awarded the British Society of Magazine Editors' prize for Columnist of the Year. Kuper has also written for outlets such as The Guardian and The Times. Kuper’s unique approach to sports writing, particularly on football, has earned him several prestigious accolades, including the 1994 William Hill Sports Book of the Year. He writes about sports "from an anthropological perspective." Time Magazine has called him “one of the world’s leading writers on soccer” and The Economic Times labeled him “one of the world's most famous football writers.” He is the author of several books, among them the William Hill awarded Football Against the Enemy and the Sunday Times Bestseller about UK politics, Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Born in Uganda to South African parents, Kuper spent most of his childhood in the Netherlands and lives in Paris.