Namwali Serpell’s new novel, The Furrows, was named one of the top 10 books of 2022 by The New York Times and was one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. The New Yorker has written that it “reinvents the elegy.” Her first novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction “that confronts racism and explores diversity,” the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Grand Prix des Associations Littéraires for Belles-Lettres. It was also named one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019 and a book of the year by the New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, and BuzzFeed. Born in Lusaka, Zambia, she now lives in New York and teaches at Harvard University.