She is a tenured full Professor of English at Harvard University. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 2008-2020. Her first monograph, a work of literary criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces (Transit Books, 2020), was long listed for a Believer Book Award for Nonfiction and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her essay, “River of Time,” was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021. Her essay, “She’s Capital,” won the 2023 American Society of Magazine Editor’s Award for Reviews and Criticism.

F.A.Q.

How did you become a writer?

I was always a bookworm. But I became a writer when I became an immigrant. My family moved to Hull, England, when I was two. That is where I uttered my first simile, according to my father. I was sitting on the floor of his office, drawing pictures while he worked at his desk. And I looked up and said, “D’you know, Papa? Suns are like spiders.” He peered down at my sheet of paper and, sure enough, I had drawn a circle with eight spokes. Then, when I was eight and half, we moved from Lusaka, Zambia to Baltimore, Maryland. I basically lived at the Pikesville public library and was enrolled in an after school program on science fiction, where we read The Tripod Trilogy—my introduction to the genre. There is a small red spiral notebook that I kept at the time, and that I still have. Inside you can find, in painstaking cursive, my full name, my address, and a set of ideas for stories with titles like “Friends Forever… I hope,” “Brainy Magic,” and “Gymnastics and Horses Don’t Rhyme.” Titular genius aside, what strikes me about all of these ideas now is that they reflect a lonely young brown girl trying to make sense of a new world. I wrote a lot of bad poetry in high school and was on the literary magazine staff. But I studied microbiology in the magnet program there and started off as a Biology major in college. I switched to being an English major in my second semester, after reading Paradise Lost.

Why did you get a PhD in Literature?

After graduation, I moved back in with my parents in Takoma Park, Maryland and worked for a few months at a bookstore, which turned into a toy store. I then worked as an editorial assistant at the press that publishes research from the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. These were very boring but very useful jobs, in that I learned about the financial and editorial side of the book world, and also in that I decided I didn’t want to do either for that necessity for most writers: a day job. I went to graduate school because I wanted to write and I felt I needed to read more to do so. I also needed funding to support myself and had student loans to pay off and there weren’t very many funded MFA programs at the time. So, with the model and advice of my sister, I applied for fully funded PhD programs. I deeply relished those six years of being paid a modest living to read and write as I pleased.

Why did you become a professor of literature?

I got a job as an academic—again I needed to support myself—right before the 2008 recession. I doubt I’d be a professor now otherwise. If I hadn’t gotten a job, my plan was to move home to Zambia, where my parents had returned in 2002, and write fiction from there. That said, a university job is, as Vladimir Nabokov once said, as good a place as any for a writer to have a day job: “A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young.” Now that I have tenure, I tend to teach courses I wish I could take; I tend to write for an audience beyond the academy; and I let curiosity lead me more than any sense of mastery or professional obligation.

What is your advice to writers about craft?

I don’t believe in “craft”; I tend to revise as I go but I believe more in “revision” as a process that takes place with my readers: my sister, my close friends, and my partner. My two main pieces of advice for aspiring writers are: 1. read more and 2. know thyself. First of all, why are you a writer if you don’t read? You may as well just write in a diary. Writing is a conversation across time with other writers; E.M. Forster saw all the English novelists he wrote about in Aspects of Fiction “seated together in a room, a circular room. . . all writing their novels simultaneously.” It may seem insular but it is in fact grandly expansive. As Toni Morrison said, “Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading.” And second, stop trying to become, or suit the needs or expectations of, anyone else when it comes to your writing process. Figure out how you work—your best and worst habits, sensitivities and capabilities, talents and liabilities as a writer—and then build a process that accommodates that.

What is your advice to writers about getting published?

Ask yourself this question: Why do you want to publish? Read this Emily Dickinson poem and think about it some more. If you still want to publish, ask yourself these two questions: One, whom do you want to reach with your work? And two, what sort of published work do you like to read? Seek out the venues, agents, and editors interested in the same kind of work and the same kind of audience. You can find lists of these online to apply to. I found my agent through the first short story I published, “Muzungu,” which I submitted in a stamped envelope to a call for papers for new African literature by a small magazine called Callaloo. When that story was published and selected for The Best American Short Stories, my agent reached out directly to me.

What is your writing routine?

When I’m not teaching, I write in the late morning/early afternoon after eating a soft boiled egg and a latte. I prefer to write when I’m a little sleepy, with direct sunlight on me, outside if possible. I write on my laptop, using Word, which is janky, but a janky I know. I can write for three hours every other day if it’s fiction. I can write for five hours every day if it’s nonfiction or criticism. I don’t recommend my routine to anyone else. The best “routine” is the one that suits your writing (see this book for sheer variety).

What is the relationship between your criticism and your fiction?

My criticism and my fiction have a Jekyll/Hyde relationship—one of them is always scrawling blasphemous marginalia in the other’s work. I’m aware that the two are in conversation, and I love when other people try to transcribe that conversation, but I’d rather not be privy to it—it would limit my sense of freedom with both. In general, I think we overstate these divisions. Again, to quote Morrison, “I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.” But I do not have an idea and then decide which form to express it in—the idea comes with its ideal form.

How do you know when a piece of writing is done?

It is never done; I often revise my words literally as I’m reading them aloud at events. But you know it has to go to the publisher or to your editor or into a drawer when you’re too sick of your own words to try to fix it anymore.

What was it like writing The Old Drift for twenty years?

I didn’t take twenty years to write The Old Drift. I started it in 2000, worked on it off and on until 2006 while I was writing my dissertation, then put it aside to work on The Furrows from 2008-2014, while I was turning the dissertation into my first academic book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, for which I got tenure. When an excerpt of The Old Drift, “The Sack,” was nominated for the Caine Prize in 2015, I returned to it to revise the scattered third I’d drafted. When I won the prize and got a book contract, I finished writing the remaining two thirds (and cut about a fifth, including that Caine Prize excerpt) over the course of about two years, during most of which I wasn’t teaching because I was on medical, family, and sabbatical leave. It was then a two-year process of revision and responding to edits before publication in 2019.

Is your writing autobiographical?

Like every fiction writer, my work cobbles together fragments of memory, dream, fantasy, experience, projection, and history from my own life. But I would find it extremely boring to sit down and intentionally write about myself. The point of writing for me is to escape myself and my life, to immerse myself in thinking about other people.

Do you think of yourself as an African writer or an American writer?

I’m a dual citizen of Zambia, where I was born and lived for much of my childhood and some of my adolescence, and America, where I received my undergraduate and graduate education and continue to live and work. I am full of admiration for aspects of both places, and for writers from either side of the Atlantic, from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to Gayl Jones. So I’d be honored to be included among them on any of the bluntly segregated shelves of the library or bookstore. I have plenty of criticism for the nation state, but I’m happy to be claimed by any nation that wishes to claim me, especially if they’re willing to grant me the freedom to live and work. Like many artists, I find purposeful nomadism suits me better than nominal patriotism.

What’s next?

I’m working on a book about Toni Morrison. have about five novels in my head that I want to write, some set in Zambia, some in the U.S., some conceived as early as 2002, others as recently as 2019. I think of them as plots of land and the draft material and notes as seeds I’ve planted; I’m not sure which garden I’ll have time to cultivate next but I’m inclined toward two right now, one about a black home care nurse in D.C. and one a comic family drama. I have two short stories that I’ve been revising for the past few years. I have two nonfiction projects I’m thinking about, an essay collection and a book about three early Afrofuturists. And I have three essays I’m researching right now—on black aesthetics, on robots, and on death, respectively.

About

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York.

Her first novel, The Old Drift (Hogarth, 2019), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize for fiction “that confronts racism and explores diversity,” the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, the Grand Prix des Associations Littéraires Prize for Belles-Lettres, the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction (with Yiyun Li). It was short listed for the L.A. Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction and long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Novel, and the Historical Writers’ Association Debut Crown. It was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year, and a book of the year by New York Times Critics, The Atlantic, NPR, and BuzzFeed.

Her second novel, The Furrows: An Elegy, was published by Hogarth on September 27, 2022. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction; it was long listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. It was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books and 100 Notable Books of 2022, and was one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year.

Her short story, “Take It,” was a finalist for the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. In 2014, she was chosen as one of the Africa 39, a Hay Festival project to identify the most promising African writers under 40. In 2011, she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her first published short story, “Muzungu,” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009 and short listed for the 2010 Caine Prize; she went on to win the 2015 Caine Prize for her short story “The Sack.”