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