Namwali Serpell (2020 Fiction)

Namwali Serpell, the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for fiction, joins The Asterisk* to discuss what makes strong sentences and good titles, her Zambian upbringing – including the lasting impacts of colonialism -- and crafting a multi-genre book.

The daughter of a British-born Zambian psychologist, Robert, and a Zambian economist, Namposya Nampanya-Serpell, Serpell and her sisters grew up on three continents: in the Zambian capital of Lusaka, Hull, England and Baltimore, Maryland. She began writing “The Old Drift” as a senior at Yale University and worked on it episodically for the next 18 years.

“The Old Drift” became one of the most acclaimed novels of 2019 – “a feat of boundless imagination, thrumming with inventiveness,” as Anisfield-Wolf juror Joyce Carol Oates describes it. British novelist Ali Smith calls the story “a sprawling life force,” a book she wished she had written. “The Old Drift” won a $165,000 Windham-Campbell literature prize and the £2020 Arthur C. Clarke award.

Serpell sat down with The Asterisk* in January of 2021 from her apartment in Harlem, where she is on a research fellowship before she begins as a Harvard Professor of English in fall, 2021.