Carla Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and critic, who currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is an associate professor of English.
Background
Carla N. Serpell was born in 1980, 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 an economist). When she was nine, her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States.
Education
Serpell was educated in the United States. She completed her undergraduate degree in literature at Yale and her doctorate in American and British fiction at Harvard.
Career
Namwali Serpell has lived in California since 2008, where she is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She returns to Lusaka for visits annually.
In 2007, Serpell published her first story, Muzungu. Muzungu is the story of a precocious nine-year-old girl named Isa and her parents, who live as white expats in Zambia. Isa has a distant relationship to her parents. An only child, she seeks out the company of the black service staff, at which point she becomes conscious of her otherness in the black community, where she is referred to as "Muzungu". In fact, the first sentence of the short story already reflects the entire thematic complex of identity, racism and the coexistence of black and white: "Isabella was nine years old before she understood what being white meant." Serpell drew her inspiration for the story from an anecdote told to her by her father, a white man.
In 2015, Serpell published The Sack, a dark marvel of a short story. The "sack" of 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". Serpell won the prize for this story and announced that she would share the $15,000 prize with the other shortlisted writers, Masande Ntshanga, F.T. Kola, Elnathan John, and Segun Afolabi.
Her most recent novel, The Old Drift, was released with Hogarth (Penguin Random House) on March 21, 2019. The Old Drift blends real-life history with magical realism to tell the decades-spanning story of the small African nation.
Views
Carla N. Serpell is a feminist, once declaring: "I'm absolutely a feminist, born and bred."
Quotations:
"I always tell people when they ask how to become a writer: just read more."
"It can be quite lonely when you move as a child to an entirely new place, where your sense of self is not quite as secure. I really immersed myself in books."
"I'm absolutely a feminist, born and bred."
"Women are not always given a room of their own or long spates of their time on their own in which they can write."