Namwali Serpell

“The Civil Rights Movement in the US was all about logjams and blockades. Martin Luther King is the one who said “a riot is the language of the unheard”. And the decolonisation of our country wasn’t just boycotts and speeches. It was bombing bridges, too.”

“Stephen Hawking once said, ‘Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.’ Every small stray opens up a new way, an Eden of forking digressions.”

“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.”

“Ding. The cabin lights came on...The flight attendants paced the aisles like antic tightrope walkers, with fixed smiles and mussed make-up. They were done with coddling. They snatched Naila's blankets and demanded her headset, they claimed her rubbish and chastised her tilted seat.””

“Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly - weeping was just what she did now, who she was - Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied”

“They were not kings. The empire was a frikkin sham. They were colonialists, and for that you only need brute force – nothing to boast of when you have it. Power’s just an accident that depends on the weakness of others.”

“Old like her father was old, a shaggy shambling old, an old where you'd lost the order of things and felt so sad that you simply had to embrace the loss, reassuring yourself with the lie that you hadn't really wanted all that order to begin with.”

“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…”

“…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 meant people who were coming into Zambia, not people who were leaving, fleeing as refugees to go to the West…”

“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.”

“…partly because I’m perceived as black…the idea I could look at my mother and say to her that I’m not black makes no sense. To me, blackness is just part of what the family is.”