Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell was born in Zambia in 1980 and is associate professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Tin House, n + 1, McSweeney’s, The Believer, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Guardian. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; was selected as one of the Africa 39, a Hay Festival Project to identify the 39 best African writers under 40; appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2009; was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2010, and won the Caine Prize in 2015. On reading Jane Eyre, she says: “I first read it in one long, fevered sitting that took me through the night to a grey, rainy morning. It was 1995 and I was back in Zambia for a year of secondary school. Perhaps that’s why my story commingles these two versions of home: my country and the wild landscape of letters into which I so often escape. Jane has always seemed my spiritual double.”