Serpell's debut novel, The Old Drift, was published in 2019. Serpell's 'On Black Difficulty: Toni Morrison and the Thrill of Imperiousness' won the 2019 Brittle Paper Award for Essays & Think Pieces.

Serpell is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. The journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction called the book 'a bravura performance'.

In 2014, Serpell published Seven Modes of Uncertainty, a critical work that examines 'the relationship between literature's capacity to unsettle, perplex, and bewilder us, and literature's ethical value'. I was kind of writing my story against that.' It also has political implications: 'I was studying American and British fiction, and was studying African contemporary fiction, and her theory was that any time you saw a sack in African literature, it was a hidden reference to the transatlantic slave trade. The 'sack' of the title, according to Serpell, derives from a terrifying dream she had at 17, 'and I didn't know if I was on the inside or the outside'. Serpell was the first Caine winner from Zambia. Saying 'fiction is not a competitive sport', Serpell announced she would share the $15,000 prize with the other shortlisted writers, Masande Ntshanga, F. Her story 'The Sack' won the Caine Prize in 2015. In 2011, she received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a prize for beginning women writers. Serpell's short story 'Muzungu' was shortlisted in 2010 for the Caine Prize, an annual award for African short fiction in English. She resides in the United States and visits Lusaka annually. From 2008 to 2020, she was a professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University. Serpell became an American citizen in 2017.

She completed her undergraduate degree in literature at Yale and her doctorate (PhD) in American and British fiction at Harvard.

When she was nine, her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States, where Serpell was educated. Her British-Zambian father is a professor of psychology at the University of Zambia, and her mother was an economist. Serpell was born in 1980 in Lusaka, Zambia, to Robert Serpell and his wife, Namposya Nampanya Serpell. In 2020, Serpell won the Belles-lettres category Grand Prix of Literary Associations 2019 for her debut novel The Old Drift. Her short story 'The Sack' won the 2015 Caine Prize for African fiction in English. In April 2014, she was named on Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with the potential and talent to define trends in African literature. Robert Serpell and Namposya Nampanya SerpellĬarla Namwali Serpell (born 1980) is an American and Zambian writer who teaches in the United States.

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell