Name Namwali Serpell | Role Writer | |
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Books Seven Modes of Uncertainty, The Ethics of Uncertainty: Reading Twentieth-century American Literature | ||
Zambian namwali serpell 2015 caine prize winner shares her experience
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. In April 2014 she was named on the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature.
Contents
- Zambian namwali serpell 2015 caine prize winner shares her experience
- Namwali serpell on short stories
- Career
- References
Namwali serpell on short stories
Career
Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia, 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), and at the age of nine she moved to Baltimore, US.
She was educated in the United States, studying literature at Harvard and Yale. Since 2008 she has lived in California, where she is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She returns to Lusaka for visits annually.
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.
"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. Serpell was the first Caine winner from Zambia. 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."