Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell is an award-winning novelist and critic. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and Time magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and selected as a New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year. Stranger Faces, her first book of criticism, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She is Professor of English at Harvard University, where she teaches a course on Toni Morrison, and lives in New York City.