Saying "fiction is not a competitive sport", Serpell announced she would share the $15,000 prize with the other shortlisted writers, Masande Ntshanga, F. T. Kola, Elnathan John, and Segun Afolabi.

[15] Serpell's "On Black Difficulty: Toni Morrison and the Thrill of Imperiousness" won the 2019 Brittle Paper Award for Essays & Think Pieces.

Reviewing it in The Guardian, Nadifa Mohamed wrote: "Namwali Serpell’s first novel is a rambunctious epic that traces the intertwined histories of three families over three generations.

"[17] The Observer's review concluded, "By the end, set in a near future involving a new digital device embedded in the user’s skin, we realise how slyly Serpell is testing our assumptions, before a cunning last-minute swerve forces us to question why we don’t consider science fiction a viable mode for the great African novel.

The other winners were Yiyun Li; Maria Tumarkin and Anne Boyer for nonfiction; Bhanu Kapil and Jonah Mixon-Webster for poetry; and Julia Cho and Aleshea Harris for drama.

The Windham-Campbell Prize has proven unique in celebrating writing in Africa based solely on its literary achievement; it's deeply gratifying to be taken seriously as an artist.

[24][25][26] Serpell responded on Twitter on 25 September that she had received news of the award "within an hour of hearing that the cops who killed Breonna Taylor weren't charged.

Join me",[27] explaining the reason for her show of solidarity in a BBC interview: "I've been trying to figure out how to acknowledge both the honor that this award grants to my novel and the feeling that the political revolution I'm describing in the novel is yet to come…My novel is not exactly prophetic.

And that culture, I want to say, is one where science fiction is a force that lets us probe real urgent political questions about equality and power and justice.

[4] Serpell's The Furrows, published in 2022, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.