Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011, and was selected for the Africa39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her first novel, “The Old Drift” (Hogarth, 2019), was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year, a Top Book of 2019 by The New York Times Critics, and a book of the year by The Atlantic, NPR, and BuzzFeed.