Writer and politician Grace Ogot was born in 1930 in the Central Nyanza area of Kenya. Trained as a nurse while a young woman, Ogot worked in Uganda and England before returning to Kenya. As a young and upcoming writer, Ogot first entered the Kenyan literary scene in the early 1960s when she began to publish stories in the African journal Black Orpheus. Many of these stories, of which "The Green Leaves" is one, later became part of the collection Land of Thunder, published in 1968. Her 1966 novel, The Promised Land, was the first novel published by a woman by the influential East African Publishing House. Since then, she has published two other novels, The Graduate, in 1980, and The Strange Bride (1989), which was written in Luo, Ogot's native language, and translated into English and Kiswahili. She has also published two other volumes of short stories in English.

Her...