Lite Reads Selection: ‘The Sack’ by Namwali Serpell

Welcome to The Feminist Bibliothecary’s Lite Reads, where we read a different short story every week, and then discuss it here and on social media. This week’s Lite Reads selection is The Sack by Namwali Serpell!

The Sack by Namwali Serpell was published in 2014 as part of Africa39, a list of 39 promising Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40. Serpell was awarded the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2015, at which she said: “fiction is not a competitive sport,” and she shared the prize money with the other writers shortlisted for the prize that year.  The Caine Prize website describes the story as “The power struggle between two men, one very ill, and the woman who came between them.”

Namwali Serpell (1980-) is a Zambian writer and an associate professor of English at Berkeley. She has published numerous short stories and essays, and in 2019 she released her very first novel, The Old Drift, a multi-generational historical fiction epic set in Zambia. She has been the recipient of multiple awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Caine Prize, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.  Before winning the Caine Prize in 2015 for this very short story, she was also shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2010 for her short story Muzungu.

You can read The Sack by Namwali Serpell in full through this PDF. You can also listen to the story in an audio format through Soundcloud as read by Chakuchanya Harawa.

Join us in the comments section here, or on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram, to participate in discussions throughout the week. You can also join in on the discussion at Litsy by following @elizabethlk and the #litereads hashtag. Our full review will be available Saturday, July 11.