She wrote the opening paragraph in 2000 and the Old Drift section after visiting the Zambian site in 2013. “The writing is exquisite her descriptions of water – Victoria Falls, Lake Malawi, even rain – are awesome.” “ The Old Drift” is “a phenomenal accomplishment, nothing less than a retelling/reimagining of the creation and ‘history’ of Zambia,” observes Anisfield-Wolf juror Rita Dove. Towering close by is the natural wonder dubbed “Victoria Falls” by David Livingstone, but called Mosi-oa-Tunya or “The Smoke That Thunders” for the many centuries before the British explorer came across it. This accident involving a local busboy, an Italian hotelier and a British photographer reverberates across three generations and 566 pages. The novel spools out from a fateful 1904 incident set in a hotel bar near the Old Drift, a colonial settlement on the Zambezi River where the waters are quiet enough to drift across in a boat. I tend, when I think in Zambian words, to think in Bemba, not Nyanja.” We speak Nyanja, Namwanga, Mambwe and Bemba.
“My parents speak two different Bantu languages, and even my sister and I speak different languages so, we all speak to each other in English. “The local news is still delivered in seven languages,” Serpell told the Los Angeles Times about Lusaka. “A feat of boundless imagination, thrumming with inventiveness,…” Joyce Carol Oatesīantu words pepper “ The Old Drift,” as do Italian and Telugu ones. And in March 2020, “ The Old Drift” won a $165,000 Windham-Campbell literature prize. British novelist Ali Smith calls the story “a sprawling life force,” a book she wished she had written. Talent and timing turned the jest on its head when “ The Old Drift” became one of the most savored and acclaimed books of 2019 – “a feat of boundless imagination, thrumming with inventiveness,” as Anisfield-Wolf juror Joyce Carol Oates describes it. From the beginning, she and her friends would joke, “It’s the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.” She began writing “ The Old Drift” as a senior at Yale University and worked on it episodically for the next 18 years. The author, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, earned her doctorate at Harvard University. She and her sisters grew up in the Zambian capital of Lusaka, as well as in Hull, England, and Baltimore, where their parents’ nomadic work took them. She is the daughter of a British-born Zambian psychologist, Robert, and a Zambian economist, Namposya Nampanya-Serpell. The novelist, literary critic and short story writer Namwali Serpell was born in Zambia 16 years after her country threw off colonial rule.
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