Pat Wambui Ngurukie is an author of fiction novels whose focus is on romance in an urban setting. She has written titles such as I Will Be Your Substitute, Soldier’s Wife, Thorns of a Dead Rose (previously titled Businessman’s Wife), Tough Choices and The CEO’s Wife. She co-authored Our Mother’s Footsteps with Professor Wanjiku Kabira, an exploration of the Lari Massacre.

Ngurukie’s gift of writing was apparent from a young age. As a young girl growing up in the mid-1950s, she would listen to her grandmother in the evenings telling stories about ogres. She particularly liked the moral teachings that invariably brought each story to its conclusion. Later in her life, her love of writing was kindled as she listened to speeches by President Jomo Kenyatta. In 1976, she decided to translate the President’s speeches, which had been published in the Daily Nation newspaper, into Kikuyu. She also embarked on translating Facing Mount Kenya, a book written by the President about the life of the Kikuyu. Due to copyright issues, the book could not be published by the Kenya Literature Bureau. However, the project introduced her to the world of literature and publishing.

In 1978, she travelled to her rural home in Nyeri to interview some elderly women who used to tell the ogre stories when she was a child, with the aim of collecting the stories. She documented about 100 such stories, some of which are yet to be translated.

Her love for novels led her to begin writing novellas on relationships. She realised that she and her friends faced problems in their fledgling marriages and yet few women were willing to talk about these issues, preferring instead to pretend that all was well. It was during this period that she wrote stories like I Will Be Your Substitute and Soldier’s Wife. The latter won second place in the Commonwealth competition in 1990. This created an opportunity to represent East Africa in the International Writers’ Programme at Iowa University in the United States. She wrote several other books over the course of the next few years.

Ngurukie has been involved in projects to publish the cultural stories she had collected and compiled, and to produce them in audio-visual format. In 2008, with the help of her daughters, Ngurukie negotiated with Good News International – Africa to produce DVDs for the stories. Three stories were performed and shot at the Bomas of Kenya in 2012. In 2014, she published two books based on Bible characters: The Calling of Moses and Paul and Silas. In addition to her work as an author, Ngurukie is involved in community work and women’s empowerment. In 2004, she helped found the Hadassah Initiative, a non political evangelical Christian movement of Kenyan women seeking to make a positive impact in people’s lives.

Ngurukie has raised concerns about Western fairy tales that have for many years been the staple literary fare for Kenyan children, and de- cries the fact that many of them have no moral teaching. She urges Kenyan parents to buy books by Kenyan writers for their children so as to provide them with stories that are relatable.