Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “The Sack.” 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. Her first published story, “Muzungu,” was selected for “The Best American Short Stories 2009” and short-listed for the 2010 Caine Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Tin House, Triple Canopy, Callaloo, n+1, Cabinet, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and the New York Review of Books. “The Old Drift” (March 2019) is her newest novel.