Pickett
Munkombwe
Pickett Munkombwe is a researcher, evaluator, and writer based in Lusaka, Zambia. He works at the intersection of public health, programme evaluation, and the study of how institutions gather and use evidence. His professional training is quantitative and applied; his reading is wider than that.
In his day work he serves as the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Research Coordinator at Zambia's National HIV/AIDS/STI/TB Council, where he helps stitch together the evidence architecture of the national HIV response. The work takes him into questions about how data travels from a district office into a ministerial decision, and what gets lost along the way. It has taught him, among other things, that institutions and relationships rhyme: both require structures honest enough to hold pressure, and practices warm enough to make the structures livable.
On writing this book
Felt and True is his first book. It grew out of a private observation about the difference between being a good person and being a good partner, refined into a two-axis model through extended conversation, and developed into a book intended for couples who have been together long enough to recognise the question in their own lives. The book does not promise to fix any particular partnership. It offers instead a clearer way of seeing one.
The book was written in the form now made possible by modern AI writing systems: a long, careful conversation between a writer holding the argument and an AI assistant helping shape the prose. The framing, the two-axis model, the Zambian grounding, and the editorial direction throughout are the author's. The sentences were largely produced by the AI under that direction. This is disclosed openly, because readers have a right to know how a book was made.
On Lusaka and the writing life
Much of the book was written in evenings and weekends, in a small flat in Lusaka, with Kabulonga rain coming in through windows that did not close properly. The places the book's interludes are set — Kabulonga, the Copperbelt, Livingstone — are places the author has lived in or through. The idioms of marriage the book draws on are idioms the author has watched in his own family, in the families of friends, and in the quiet lives of a generation of Zambian couples navigating urban professional life at some distance from the villages and networks that once witnessed them.
Future writing, when it appears, will continue from this ground. A researcher who writes. A Zambian who writes from here, for readers wherever they are, without flattening either world into the other.
For correspondence, reading-group enquiries, or press, see the contact page. Honest readings are welcome. Kind ones too.