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Iris Mwanza is a Zambian-American author and gender equality advocate. Born and raised in Zambia, Mwanza 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 she's a member of the World Wildlife Foundation U.S. board of directors. Her debut novel, The Lions' Den (Graydon House, June 25, 2025), took her nine years of nights and weekends to finish, and is a moving portrait of Zambian life and politics at a moment of great transformation.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
A legal thriller that will grab you and take you for a twisty ride across time and place, only to release you on the last page.
On your nightstand now:
Fi: A Memoir of My Son by Alexandra Fuller. I knew and loved Fi, this beautiful ancestor, and Alexandra's book is the ultimate roadmap for surviving grief.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. I grew up in a landlocked country so I have an inexplicable love for maritime stories. The title seems to give it away, but it still holds many surprises and is so rich in detail that you'll feel the dangers of sea storms, scurvy, and murderous seamen.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. This book so captured my imagination that I would obsessively look in the back of wardrobes for a passage to Narnia. I was so sure that if there was one portal in the English countryside, there had to be another in the Zambian capital.
Your top five authors:
Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Chinua Achebe, Alice Walker, Alexandra Fuller.
Book you've faked reading:
The Harry Potter series. I haven't seen the movies either, so I nod and smile, and exclaim, "That Harry! How wizardly!" It helps that my audience is usually under 10 years old.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Beloved by Toni Morrison. I come back to this book every few years to reexamine the issues which take time, experience, and maturity to fully understand.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I wouldn't buy a book for its cover, but I do like the visually powerful silhouettes and contrasting colors of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
Book you hid from your parents:
None. Books were and are a big luxury so we rarely had our own children's books, but we could read whatever was in my parents' library. They were academics and very permissive, so we never, ever thought to hide what we were reading.
Book that changed your life:
Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. I read it as a teen and had never read anything like it before, or since.
Favorite line from a book:
"The storytellers begin by calling upon those who come before who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers." --from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Five books you'll never part with:
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller
The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, an early African feminist writer whose writing, I have no doubt, will still resonate today.