Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian-American author and academic. Born in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1980, she moved to the United States as a child. She is a Professor of English at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on African literature, narrative theory, and the history of the novel. She received her BA from Harvard and her PhD from Yale. Serpell is the author of the essay collection Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014) and the novel The Old Drift (2019), an ambitious multigenerational saga of three intertwined families set against the history of Zambia from the colonial era to a near-future speculative present. The Old Drift won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2020, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the LA Times Book Prize for first fiction, and other honours. It is celebrated for its formal ambition, its narrative exuberance, and its achievement in rendering the full complexity of African history and African modernity in literary fiction. Serpell is also a prominent critic and essayist on literature and film. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.