#SheInspiresMe: A Coffee with Novelist Jemma Wayne

As part of our #SheInspiresMe campaign, we hosted an intimate and inspiring evening with writer Jemma Wayne, and discussed her first novel After Before, which follows the powerful story of Emily, an immigrant and survivor of the Rwandan genocide who struggles to come to terms with her new life in London, after her old life in Rwanda is torn apart by loss and betrayal. This event was a unique opportunity to hear the inspiration behind the novel and guests shared their own thoughts, asked questions and gained an insight into the incredible day-to-day resilience shown by women survivors of war around the world. We also heard from Women for Women International’s Rwandan Country Director, Antoinette Uwimana, and had the chance to sample some of the delicious Rwandan coffee grown by our very own programme graduates in Rwanda.

Jemma's first novel, After Before, was short-listed for the 2015 Waverton Good Read Award, long-listed for the Guardian’s 2014 Not the Booker Prize and for the 2015 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, formerly the Orange Prize.

Set in a bleak, wintry England, After Before follows the lives of three women on the brink of crisis. Emily, an immigrant survivor of the Rwandan genocide is existing - but not living. Vera, a newly Christian Londoner is striving to live a moral life, her happiness undermined by her secretive past. Lynn, battling with an untimely disease, is consumed by bitterness and resentment of what she hasn’t achieved and what has been snatched from her. But as their paths interweave, they begin to unravel their beleaguered pasts, and inadvertently change each other’s futures.