Programs The Lions Den - Iris Mwanza in Conversation with Namwali Serpell

The Lions’ Den: Iris Mwanza in Conversation with Namwali Serpell

HYBRID PROGRAM

Mark your calendars for Thursday, October 3rd from 6:30PM to 8:00PM, as The Africa Center proudly presents The Lions’ Den: Iris Mwanza in Conversation with Namwali Serpell. This program brings together author and gender equality advocate, Iris Mwanza, and Namwali Serpell, writer and a Professor of English at Harvard University, for a compelling discussion around Mwanza’s internationally praised debut novel, The Lions’ Den. 

Set in the 1990s in Mwanza’s native Zambia, The Lions’ Den is about fresh-from-the-village rookie lawyer, Grace, who is given her first pro bono case to try in court. Grace is set to defend a young queer dancer, Willbess ‘Bessy’ Mulenga, who has been arrested for offenses “against nature.” Presented with a freshly beaten client, Grace protests to the police and gets barred from accessing Bessy, who then disappears from the system—and the world—without a trace. As she fights for justice for Bessy, Grace must navigate a dangerous world of corrupt politicians, traditional beliefs, and deep-seated homophobia.

About the Speakers:

Iris Mwanza is a Zambian-American author and gender equality advocate. Born and raised in Zambia, early exposure to inequality has been a driving force in her life - from becoming a lawyer, writing a Ph.D. dissertation on women and children’s rights, a career fighting for gender equality, and now a thriller with gender equality as its heart. Iris has spent an inordinate amount of time studying and has law degrees from Cornell University and the University of Zambia, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Her day job is Deputy Director of the Women in Leadership team in the Gender Equality Division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and her night job is to write. Her debut novel The Lions’ Den took 9 years of nights and weekends to finish. Iris tries to do her part for all creatures great and small and is a proud member of the WWF US Board of Directors.

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and a Professor of English at Harvard University. She received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was selected for the Africa39. Her first novel, The Old Drift (Hogarth, 2019), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize, 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 named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her novel, The Furrows: An Elegy (Hogarth, 2022), was long listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Carol Shields Award for fiction, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the California Book Award for Fiction. It was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2022, and one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces (Transit, 2020), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.  

Events are free and open to all. Registration does not guarantee entrance, so we recommend that you arrive early. The program can also be viewed virtually on our Facebook page and YouTube channel.