Visiting Hurst Professor - Craft Talk - Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. 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, the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction (with Yiyun Li). It was short listed for the L.A. Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction and long listed 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 Hogarth on September 27, 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 favorite books of the year.

Her short story, “Take It,” was a finalist for the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. In 2014, she was chosen as one of the Africa 39, a Hay Festival project to identify the most promising African writers under 40. In 2011, she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her first published short story, “Muzungu,” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009 and short listed for the 2010 Caine Prize; she went on to win the 2015 Caine Prize for her short story “The Sack.”

She is a tenured full Professor of English at Harvard University. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 2008-2020. Her first monograph, a work of literary criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces (Transit Books, 2020), was long listed for a Believer Book Award for Nonfiction and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her essay, “River of Time,” was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021. Her essay, “She’s Capital,” won the 2023 American Society of Magazine Editor’s Award for Reviews and Criticism.