Veteran author Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye died yesterday at her home in Ngara, Nairobi.

Marjorie, who has been called the “mother of Kenyan literature”, had distinguished herself as a writer of poetry, novels and children’s stories including Freedom Song and Song For The Unborn Dead.

Her 1986 novel Coming to Birth won the Sinclair Prize for fiction in 1986 and has been used as a set book in Kenyan high schools. She also authored Homing In, which was second in the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 1985

She was born in Southampton, England, in 1928, and came to Kenya as a missionary bookseller in 1954. She married D.G.W. Macgoye in 1960.

Marjorie had been ranked alongside David Maillu, Charles Mangua, Mwangi Gicheru, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Muthoni Likimani among others.