Namwali Serpell
ZambiaAbout
Namwali Serpell (born 1980) is a Zambian-American novelist, essayist, and literary scholar, born in Lusaka, Zambia. She studied at Yale University and earned a PhD in English from Harvard University before pursuing an academic career. Her writing is known for its intellectual ambition, formal experimentation, and exploration of race, identity, technology, and the legacies of colonialism. Serpell first attracted international attention with her short story The Sack, which won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her debut novel, The Old Drift (2019), established her as a major contemporary literary voice and received several prestigious awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her later works include Stranger Faces, a collection of essays examining how we perceive unfamiliar faces and bodies, and The Furrows, a novel exploring grief and memory. Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University, where her scholarship and creative work examine the possibilities of contemporary literature.
