AUTHOR INTERVIEW

1.  Tell us a little bit about yourself, your hobbies and interests.

My name is Lukonge Achilles Musaasizi, and I was the ninth of twelve children born in a banana plantation in Kisaka village, in southwestern Uganda — a village whose name literally means "bush." By training I'm a social worker, an economist, a historian, and an IT professional, but if you ask the people I've worked with over the years, they'll probably just call me an advocate — for children, for the girl child, for persons with disabilities, and for anyone the world has quietly decided to stop paying attention to. I founded Give a Hand to the Poor Arch Foundation (GIHPAF) and The Dream Academy to try to close that gap in some small way.

Outside of work, I'm happiest with a book in my hand. I read constantly, and when I'm not reading, I'm usually writing something — books, blog posts, whatever wants to get out of my head that day. I unwind with meditation music and slow jams, the kind of sound that lets your mind actually rest. I love a good film, especially anything adapted from a true story, along with drama, romance, thrillers, and the occasional horror when I'm feeling brave. Social networking is a genuine joy for me too — I love hearing other people's stories almost as much as I love telling my own. And whenever I can, I travel, mostly just to be near nature — to listen to birdsong, to stand somewhere quiet, and to remember how small and how lucky I am. But at the center of all of it is family. Nothing recharges me the way time with the people I love does.

2.  When and why did you start writing books?

I started writing long before I called myself a writer. As a boy, I was the kind of child who noticed everything and forgot very little, and eventually all of that noticing needed somewhere to go. But the real turning point came later, when I realized that my mother — who lived through the 1978–79 Uganda–Tanzania War and carried every detail of it in her memory — would not be here forever, and neither would the stories she alone could tell. I understood, almost with a kind of panic, that if I didn't write them down, they would simply disappear with her. That's really where it began: not ambition, but urgency. I published my first book, a parenting guide, in 2018, but The Dream From Dust is the book that started it all in my heart, long before it ever reached the page.

3.  What made you decide to tackle writing as a career?

Honestly, I didn't choose writing so much as writing chose me and simply refused to let go. I spent years working directly with teenage mothers, orphaned children, and persons living with HIV in the fishing communities along Lake Victoria, and I kept running into the same problem: the statistics and the case files could never hold the whole truth of what these lives actually contained. Somewhere along the way, I realized that storytelling was doing work that policy reports alone could never do — it was making people feel something, and feeling is very often the first step toward change. Writing became a natural extension of the same mission that built GIHPAF and The Dream Academy. I'm not just trying to sell books. I'm trying to make sure certain stories — my family's, and the families I've served — don't vanish the way so many stories from places like mine tend to.

4.  Which one of your books or characters is your favourite?

That's a little like asking a parent to name a favourite child, but if I'm honest, it's my mother, as she appears in The Dream From Dust. I spent months coaxing her story out of her, sitting with her under an avocado tree while she told my siblings and me, in her own words, what it was like to survive a war with three children strapped to her body and a bicycle as her only real defence. Writing her into the book — her courage, her quiet strategic mind, the way she used silence itself as a kind of weapon — is the achievement I'm proudest of in anything I've written. She never set out to be a character in a book. She just lived a life worth one.

5.  Which one of your books was the hardest to write and stretched you the most as a writer?

Without question, The Dream From Dust. There is a particular kind of difficulty in writing about your own father's alcoholism, and then, partway through the writing itself, having to write about his death. I lost my father, Deogracious Kaggwa, in October 2021, and there were entire weeks where I could not physically make myself return to the chapters about him. Grief has a way of rewriting your relationship to your own memories, even the ones you thought you'd already made peace with. I had to learn how to be honest about the harm he caused without erasing the very real love underneath it — and I had to do that while still actively grieving him. It stretched me in ways no craft book ever could have prepared me for. I don't think I came out the other side of that manuscript as the same writer, or the same son, who went in.

6.  Who is your favourite author and book?

I find myself returning again and again to memoirists who managed to write about pain without ever asking the reader for pity — Tara Westover's Educated, William Kamkwamba's The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, and Trevor Noah's Born a Crime are the three that shaped how I eventually approached my own story. Each of those books taught me something different: Westover taught me how to write about family without flattening anyone into a villain; Kamkwamba taught me that ingenuity born of poverty deserves to be treated as genuine brilliance, not a footnote; and Noah taught me that even the hardest material can, and sometimes should, make you laugh. If I had to pick just one, I'd probably say Educated, if only because I've reread it more times than any other book on my shelf.

7.  What book are you reading right now?

At the moment I'm splitting my time between two very different kinds of reading. For pleasure, I'm rereading Born a Crime, partly for comfort and partly because I'm always studying how Noah balances humour against genuinely painful material — it's a skill I'm still trying to sharpen in my own work. For research, I'm deep in materials on Uganda's political history as I prepare the next instalment in my Blurred Light From the West series, tracing the threads between the past I wrote about in Regression of Democracy in Uganda and the headlines I'm watching unfold in the country today.

8.  Where do you get your inspiration for your books?

Almost entirely from life — mine, my family's, and the lives of the people I've had the privilege of serving through my humanitarian work. My childhood in Kisaka village gave me more material than I could exhaust in ten books: my father's alcoholism and eventual redemption, my mother's wartime survival, jiggers infestations that nearly ended my education before it began, a wrongful custody ordeal that could have derailed everything. My professional life adds to that well constantly — every teenage mother, every orphaned child, every person living with HIV in the fishing villages I've worked in has taught me something about resilience that I didn't know before I met them. I also draw heavily from Uganda's political and historical record, because I don't think you can really understand any one family's suffering without understanding the larger forces pressing down on it. Dust, to me, isn't just where my story starts. It's the raw material for almost everything I write.

9.  What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

Spare time is precious, so I try to spend it on things that actually refill me rather than drain me further. Reading is at the top of that list, always. I also love slipping into a good film — especially anything based on a true story, along with drama, romance, thrillers, and the occasional horror film when I want my heart racing for reasons that have nothing to do with deadlines. I meditate often, usually with slow jams or ambient music playing quietly in the background, just to let my mind settle. Travel is another great love of mine, mostly so I can be near nature — I could listen to birdsong for hours, and there's something about standing in an open, wild place that reminds me why I do the work I do in the first place. And of course, there's social networking — I genuinely enjoy connecting with readers and fellow writers online. But above everything else, I treasure time with my family. That's where I feel most like myself.

10.  Do you have any new books in the works?

Yes, and I'm genuinely excited about this one. My memoir, The Dream From Dust: A Memoir of Triumph Against All Odds, is set for release in February 2027, and it's available for pre-order right now on Amazon. It's the most personal thing I've ever written — the story of surviving a childhood shaped by poverty, an alcoholic father, and the long shadow of a war my mother lived through, and of building, out of all of that dust, a life devoted to giving other children the chances I nearly didn't get. Beyond that, I'm already working on the next chapter of my Blurred Light From the West true-crime series, continuing the historical thread I began in A Breath of Life and Hope of Light and carried through The Fruits of Power and Regression of Democracy in Uganda. There's a great deal more story left in me yet, and I hope you'll come along for it.