Namwali Serpell, 41, won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction for her first novel, The Old Drift, a multigenerational, multigenre saga set in Rhodesia and Zambia, where she was born. Shortlisted for the US National Book Critics Circle award for her essay collection Stranger Faces, which was cited for its “wry wit and cultural range”, she has written on subjects including Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, HBO’s Watchmen series and, most recently, Zola (the 19th-century French author, as well as the viral tweet thread turned movie of the same name). Her new novel, The Furrows, opens in Baltimore, where she grew up, and involves a recurring series of mysterious encounters experienced by a girl who loses her seven-year-old brother at sea. Serpell, who lives in Harlem, New York, spoke to me from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches at Harvard.
Where did The Furrows begin?
The first scene came to me as a dream when I was getting my PhD in 2008. I was in the water with a young boy, trying to swim him to shore, and I woke in the kind of panic that reminded me of the dreams I used to have following the death of my older sister, who died when I was 18 and she was 22. I started to think about how that immersion in dream space felt like memory but also fantasy; I wanted to try to capture the waves of grief that I experienced when I would wake up from a dream about her and realise once again that she had died.
