Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. She was a co-recipient of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction (with Yiyun Li). Her first novel, The Old Drift (Hogarth, 2019), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize for fiction “that confronts racism and explores diversity,” the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, the Grand Prix des Associations Littéraires Prize for Belles-Lettres, and the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was shortlisted for the L.A. Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Novel, and the Historical Writers’ Association Debut Crown. It was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year, and a book of the year by New York Times Critics, The Atlantic, NPR, and BuzzFeed.

Her second novel, The Furrows: An Elegy, was published by Vintage in 2022. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction; it was long listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. It was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books and 100 Notable Books of 2022, and was one of President Barack Obama’s favourite books of the year.