Writers Speak with Maaza Mengiste and Namwali Serpell
Date and Time
Location
WRITERS SPEAK
SPEAKERS: Maaza Mengiste and Namwali SerpeLL
About the Speakers
Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of the novel, The Shadow King, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. It was named best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Premio il ponte, and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Capital. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and BBC, among other places.
Namwali Serpell's first novel, The Old Drift (Hogarth, 2019), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize for fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, the Grand Prix des Associations Littéraires Prize for Belles-Lettres, and the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was short listed for the L.A. Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction and long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Novel, and the Historical Writers’ Association Debut Crown. She is a co-recipient of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction (with Yiyun Li). Her short story, “Take It,” was a finalist for the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. Currently, she is a Professor of English at Harvard University. Her work of literary criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces (Transit Books, 2020), was long listed for a Believer Book Award for Nonfiction and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her book, American Psycho Analysis, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press.
Moderated by Claire Messud, a novelist and Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University.
About the Series
Writers Speak, a series of literary conversations at the Mahindra Humanities Center, is convened by Claire Messud, a novelist and Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University.
This event is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Seminar on Migration and the Humanities
All MHC event times are in Eastern Time.