Achiro P. Olwoch

Achiro Patricia Olwoch hails from Gulu, in Northern Uganda. She lives in exile in New York and is currently the Weiss International Fellow at Barnard College.

She is an award-winning writer, director and producer after winning numerous awards and nominations for her 'Coffee Shop' TV series as creator and writer and 'Yat Madit' as head writer, and for her short films; 'The Surrogate', 'The Mineral Basket', 'Maraya Ni'. More recently Achiro completed and published her late father’s manuscripts, which he left behind after his death in 1994. This is alongside writing her first novel, 'Sex or Slave', set in 1940s Uganda during colonialism. She also has in the works a memoir about her life as a lesbian in Uganda and her eventual escape and another about her journey being born in exile, living through the war in Northern Uganda through to her present life in exile.

More recently, she has been published by Guernica magazine, Exposition Review, Westbeth online newsletter, and Pen America. Her play ‘The Survival’ had a debut performance at the Lincoln Center produced by the National Queer Theatre. The same play will have a series of shows at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center, 2024. This play inspired a short documentary, 'Breaking the Fourth Wall' that premiered at the Lincoln Center 2023.

She volunteers as the African Representative on the Women Playwrights International Management committee as well as the Artistic Collective of the National Queer Theatre in New York.

Achiro loves to cook as much as she loves to write and if she was not a writer, she might have been a chef.

Twitter: @achirop

Instagram: @achirop

website: www.achiropolwoch.com