Namwali Serpell
| Namwali Serpell | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1980 |
| Nationality | Zambian |
| Genres | Short story, novel |
| Notable awards |
Caine Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award |
Carla Namwali Serpell (born 1980) is a Zambian writer who teaches in the United States. Her short story "The Sack" won the 2015 Caine Prize for African fiction in English.
Career
Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka,[1] where her family still lives (her British-Zambian father is a professor of psychology at the University of Zambia, and her mother is an economist),[2] she moved to Baltimore[2] at the age of nine.
Serpell was educated in the United States, studying literature at Harvard and Yale. She has lived since 2008 in California, where she is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She returns to Lusaka for visits annually.[3]
Her story "Muzungu" was shortlisted in 2010 for the Caine Prize, an annual award for African short fiction in English. In 2011, she was awarded the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a prize for beginning women writers.[2]
"The Sack" won the Caine Prize in 2015. Serpell, saying "fiction is not a competitive sport", announced she would share the $15,000 prize with the other shortlisted writers, Masande Ntshanga, F.T. Kola, Elnathan John, and Segun Afolabi.[3] Serpell was the first Caine winner from Zambia.[4] The "sack" from the title, according to Serpell, derives from a terrifying dream she had at 17, "and I didn't know if I was on the inside or the outside". It also has political implications: "I was studying American and British fiction, and [another graduate student] was studying African contemporary fiction, and her theory was that any time you saw a sack in African literature, it was a hidden reference to the transatlantic slave trade. I was kind of writing my story against that."[4]
Works
- The Ethics of Uncertainty: Reading Twentieth-century American Literature, Harvard University, 2008, ISBN 9780549617112
- C. Namwali Serpell (1 April 2014). Seven Modes of Uncertainty. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-72909-4.
- Stories
- "Double Men", in Reader, I Married Him, HarperCollins Publishers, 2016, ISBN 9780008173500
- "Muzumgu". A Life in Full and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2010. New Internationalist. 2010. pp. 31–. ISBN 978-1-906523-37-4.
- Ellah Wakatama Allfrey (ed.). "The Sack". Africa 39 (PDF).
References
- ↑ Sharing the Earth: An International Environmental Justice Reader. University of Georgia Press. 15 June 2015. pp. 161–. ISBN 978-0-8203-4770-7.
- 1 2 3 Eastaugh, Sophie (8 July 2015). "Things to know about Caine Prize winner Namwali Serpell". CNN. Retrieved 10 July 2015.
- 1 2 Dwyer, Colin (8 July 2015). "Caine Prize Winner: Literature Is Not A Competitive Sport". NPR. Retrieved 10 July 2015.
- 1 2 Flood, Alison (7 July 2015). "Caine prize goes to Zambian Namwali Serpell". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 July 2015.
External links
- Namwali Serpell profile at University of California, Berkeley, English Department.