Raymond Carver Reading Series: Namwali Serpell

The Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences presents the Raymond Carver Reading Series.

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka. 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, and the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. She is a co-recipient of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction (with Yiyun Li). 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 novel, The Furrows, will be published in September of 2022 with Hogarth.

She is a Professor of English at Harvard University. 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.

All readings take place in Gifford Auditorium. They begin at 5 p.m. and are preceded by a question-and-answer session that begins at 4 p.m. They are open to the public.

(Photo © Peg Skorpinski)

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