Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and a Professor of English at Harvard University. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, a Caine Prize for African Writing, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her first novel, The Old Drift, won an Anisfield-Wolf prize, an Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and an Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her work of criticism, On Morrison, was published in 2026.