“Serpell is a natural social novelist, capable of conjuring a Dickensian range of characters with a painterly eye for detail.” —The Washington Post
Namwali Serpell is a fiction writer, literary critic, and professor of English at Harvard University. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize for fiction “that confronts racism and explores diversity,” among other awards. Her forthcoming book, On Morrison (2026), explores Toni Morrison’s exceptional body of work, including fiction, criticism, poetry, and plays.
Namwali was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, follows three generations of three families as they slowly become intertwined. Combining historical and science fiction, The Old Drift was called “a dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage” by novelist Salman Rushdie. 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 2022, among other accolades.
Her work spans novels, short stories, and essays, with topics from the image of the face, to the Zambian Space program, to American Psycho and beyond. Her anthology of essays on Toni Morrison, adapted from her lectures at Harvard, is currently forthcoming from Hogarth. The book explores Morrison’s work through a mixture of original close reading and archival research, bringing a dialogue between the two black women to life. On Morrison is slated for an early 2026 release.
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