Who are you looking for?

Install Famoose

Keep Famoose on your home screen or desktop for easy access.

Open this site in Chrome or Edge and look for Install app in the browser menu or address bar. If no install option appears, you can bookmark Famoose instead.

Famoose.co
Appearance
Text size
Page width
Colour
Discover›Literature
Contents
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
Writer

Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

Famoose for

Coming to Birth and writing about Kenyan life

Coming to Birth

Born
21 October 1928
Birthplace
Southampton
Died
1 December 2015

More people

Jane AustenWriting Pride and Prejudice and Emma.Charles DickensWriting Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol.Toni MorrisonWriting Beloved and winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye was a Kenyan writer born in Britain. Her fiction, poetry and bookselling formed part of a long engagement with Kenyan literary and social life.

Early life

English studies

Grew up in Southampton and studied at Royal Holloway and Birkbeck in London.

Career

  1. 1954

    Move to Kenya

    Took work running a mission bookshop in Nairobi.

  2. 1975

    Bookselling

    Became manager of the SJ Moore Bookshop.

  3. 1983

    Writing focus

    Turned more fully to writing.

Selected work

Coming to Birth

A novel linking a woman’s life with Kenya’s changing history.

Beyond work

Family and citizenship

Married doctor Daniel Oludhe Macgoye in 1960 and became a Kenyan citizen in 1964; they had four children.

Sources & photo creditBiography and career ↗Biographical references ↗

Original photograph. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Original image. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.