…It's a very interesting position to be in as an immigrant to the United States - now a citizen - who grew up in a country where the word immigrant m… - Namwali Serpell

Equality!’ he cried. ‘You see? Only from level ground can you grow new crops. The war taught me that all men are equal before death, black and white. And yesterday,’ he shrugged, ‘Miss Matha showed me that this equality thing probably includes the females, too.

I think there was an impulse in me to write women as central to the text. Part of that is my own limitations as a writer: being able to delineate the varieties of female experience is clearly easier for someone who’s lived as a woman, and projecting myself into male characters is harder for me. It’s something I have to really work on…

I probably seem quite at ease now saying I’m mixed race, I’m black, I’m Zambian, but for a while that was quite torturous, quite angsty. As a young woman I wasn’t very tender or nice to myself…Now I’m older, I’m much more able to be tender and kind to the younger me that I see in the book.