A. Aduma

Aduma started school at the age of three where she enjoyed relative calm, ate too many cakes, and spent her afternoons sleeping. She also stole building bricks and took them home with her even after a thorough search by the class teacher.

At the age of seven she was exposed to her first storybook, The Little Mermaid, which she didn’t read but spent a good amount of time fawning over the pretty pictures of Ariel and her sisters while trying not to be scared off by skeletons that were apparently Satanic, if you asked her grandmother.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Black Beauty by Anna Sewell were the first books she recalls reading and completing because they brought to her eyes endless streams of tears that so far only Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant in Two Weeks’ Notice had been able to unleash.

At the age of twelve she won best playwright in a school competition and had the pleasure of watching her play come to life during a graduation ceremony.

In high school, she wrote corny poems about her crushes but had the good sense to not send the cringe-inducing poems their way.

Currently, Aduma is at the University of Nairobi doing a degree in economics, which unfortunately has more math than she expected.