Namwali Serpell wins the 2020 Arthur C. Clarke Award for her debut
Zambian writer, Namwali Serpell is the winner of the 2020 Arthur C. Clarke Award for her first novel, The Old Drift.
The Old Drift published in 2019, “tells the stories of three families over three generations, moving from a colonial settlement by Victoria Falls at the turn of the 20th century, to the 1960s as Zambia attempts to send a woman to the moon, and into the near future. A mix of historical fiction, magical realism and sci-fi,” The Guardian.
Thade Thompson, last year’s winner and the announcer of the 2020 prize described the book in his tweet as “the great African novel of the twenty-first century,” further described it as “a book that acknowledges the African lives with the fantastic and mundane.”
“At last, an African book of unarguable universality,” Thompson tweeted. “Namwali Serpell has created something specifically Zambian and generally African at the same time. THE OLD DRIFT is everything fiction should be, and everything those of us who write should aspire to.”
Chair of judges, Andrew M Butler called The Old Drift “an extraordinary family saga that spans eras from Cecil Rhodes to Rhodes Must Fall, and beyond” and another judge, “stealth sci-fi with inheritance and infection at its heart.
“Our pandemic-ravaged world reminds us how connected our world has been for the last century or more – and this book points to the global nature of science fiction.”
Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers and was selected for the Africa 39, a Festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. She won the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. The Old Drift is her first novel.
The Arthur C. Clarke Award is a British award given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. It is named after British author Arthur C. Clarke, who gave a grant to establish the award in 1987.
