Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and a Professor of English at Harvard University. She received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. Her first novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times and one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her second novel, The Furrows: An Elegy, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the California Book Award for Fiction, and was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2022. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her most recent work, On Morrison (Hogarth), will be published in February 2026.

The Value of Support

"The Rona Jaffe is unique in three ways: 1. it divides the award money equally among the writers 2. it specifically honors potential and 3. it is for women. This goes a long way to redress the way most literary awards have worked in the past and continue to work today. The substantive sum of money provided me with a sense that I could in fact treat my writing as a career, not just a wild dream I tended to on the weekends. But more than that, the award gave me a sense of confidence and a sense of solidarity with other nascent writers. It is the ideal to which I consistently point whenever I'm asked about this aspect of the publishing industry: support women, equally, and at the moment when they most need a boost—when they are on the rise."