Namwali Serpell on Grief and Its Association With Religion and Writing
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.
In this episode, Andrew is joined by Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows.
Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and lives in New York. She received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times‘s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She is currently a professor of English at Harvard.
Orna Ophir: How a Pathology of "Schizophrenia" Might Reflect a Broken Society As Much as a Broken Mind
Leah McLaren: A Daughter's Memoir of a Mom Who Passed Down Her Trauma and Made Their Lives Impossible to Disentangle
Alice Mah on Plastics, the One Word That Best Describes Our Global Environmental Crisis
Harald H.H.W. Schmidt: Why "The End of Medicine As We Know It" Will Make All of Us Healthier and Happier
Ariel Ezrachi: How Cities, Rather Than Big Tech, Should Be the Engine for a More Equitable Digital Future
Monique Roffey: The Common Sense of Magic Realism and Why The Mermaid of Black Conch is a "Caribbean Novel"
Maureen Perry-Jenkins on Work Matters: How Parents' Jobs Shape Children's Well-Being
Saleem H. Ali: Do We Need a Science Party to Confront Existential Problems Like Global Warming?
Ari Mittleman: Does Criticism of Israel Inevitably Make One Guilty of Antisemitism?
Albert Fox Cahn: How Digital Surveillance In a Post-Roe America Isn't Substantively Different From Xi's China or Putin's Russia
Donald Robertson: Why the Graphic Novel Is an Ideal Form to Capture the Timeless Philosophy of Stoicism
Jacob M. Grumbach: Why the Crisis of American Democracy Is As Much a State and Local As a National Problem
Karen Cerulo and Janet Ruane: How We Can't Escape Social Class, Gender, or Culture in How We Dream