Old Drift (Serpell) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Where—Lusaka, Zambia
• Raised—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale; Ph.D., Havard
• Awards—Rona Jaffee Writers' Award; Caine Prize for African Writing
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California


Carla Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and academic raised in the US. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, was published in 2019.

Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia. Her father, a British-Zambian father was a professor of psychology at the University of Zambia, and her mother an economist. When she was nine, the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in the US. Serpell received her B.A. in literature from Yale and her Ph.D. in American and British fiction at Harvard.

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.

In addition to her 2019 novel, The Old Drift, Serbell has been recognized for her short stories. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story, "The Sack." Her first published story, "Muzungu," was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009, shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize, and anthologized in The Uncanny Reader.

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. (Adapted from Wikipedia and from the author's website. Retrieved 3/4/2019.)