Get your subscription for the 2023/24 Portland Arts & Lecture Series to see Zadie Smith on September 21! Click here for more information.
On Thursday, September 21, Literary Arts will host Zadie Smith as the first event of our 2023-24 season of Portland Arts & Lectures. Smith will be interviewed by Parul Sehgal, New Yorker staff writer and former New York Times book reviewer.
Zadie Smith is a critically acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and playwright, whose work includes the novel White Teeth, winner of the Guardian First Book Prize, and On Beauty, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002 and has twice been named a Granta 20 Best Young British Novelist. Her sixth novel, The Fraud, will publish in September 2023. She is a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University and lives in London.
Do authors choose what they want to write about, or sometimes, do the stories choose them?
Smith talks about her new novel The Fraud and how she ended up writing a historical novel even when she tried to avoid it, in this piece from The New Yorker.
“I hunted down every out-of-print William Harrison Ainsworth novel. (He wrote more than forty; they’re mostly awful.) I grew increasingly interested in William’s housekeeper, a woman called Eliza Touchet. I became obsessed with the plantation on which Andrew Bogle had been enslaved—the Hope Estate—and the long, brutal entanglement between England and Jamaica. I read several books about the Tichborne Claimant and thought a lot about fraud: fake identities, fake news, fake relationships, fake histories. When I tried to explain to anyone what all these subjects had in common, I did not sound like a person writing a historical novel as much as a person who had entirely lost the plot. Or perhaps: who had rediscovered plot.”
From novels, to essays, to children’s books, Smith has found success writing in a number of different forms and genres. What kinds of books does she turn to for her own pleasure?
Check out this New York Times article to find out about some of Smith’s reading habits and favorite titles!
“I much prefer reading to writing: I can’t wait.”
During the pandemic, Smith, already an accomplished novelist and essayist, turned her sights to the theater. She won a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright for her first play, The Wife of Willesden.
Find out more about how Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” led Smith to enter the new genre, and her other inspirations while writing, in this interview with The New Republic.
“Personally, I think a writer’s most profound influences come from their childhood reading. In my case you’d be better off with the Jamaican Y.A. writer Andrew Salkey, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, and Mildred D. Taylor—plus Erica Jong and James Baldwin, both of whom I nicked off my mum’s shelves, at an inappropriately young age.”
Learn more about Smith and her career below!
Zadie Smith was born in London, England in 1975. Born to a Jamaican mother and an English father, she grew up with two younger brothers in the northwest part of the city, which would be an important setting for several of her later novels. She began writing as a teenager and earned her B.A. in English from the University of Cambridge in 1998. Her time in college was markedly busy and important for the start of her career. “Without it, I don’t know that I would be the kind of writer that I am. It made me widely read. And widely read is what I survive on. If I didn’t have that, I’d really be doomed,” she has said of her Cambridge experience. She worked as a cabaret singer; met her future husband, the poet Nick Laird; and began writing her debut novel White Teeth, which explores the lives of three English families in London society.
A New York Times book review called White Teeth, “a novel that’s not afraid to tackle large, unwieldy themes. It’s a novel that announces the debut of a preternaturally gifted new writer—a writer who at the age of twenty-four demonstrates both an instinctive storytelling talent and a fully fashioned voice that’s street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time.” The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orange Prize and won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Smith was named one of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists” for the first time in 2003, receiving the honor again ten years later. Her next two novels, The Autograph Man (2003) and On Beauty (2005), were also met with critical praise, with the latter winning the Orange Prize and being a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. In 2009 she released her first collection of essays, Changing My Mind.
Smith’s next novel, NW (2012), is more experimental in nature, heavily inspired by Modernist writers including Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The book follows the lives of four Londoners, including two close female friends. It was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Smith’s fifth novel, Swing Time, followed in 2016; then another collection of essays, the National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Feel Free in 2018; followed by her first collection of short stories, Grand Union in 2019.
Recent projects have Smith stepping into new territories in terms of genre and form. In 2020, she released her third book of essays, Intimations, which was written during and about the COVID-19 pandemic. Smith and her husband coauthored the children’s picture book Weirdo in 2021. Her first play, The Wife of Willesden, a reimagining of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales, came to the stage in London in the same year and made its American debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2022. The theatrical retelling earned Smith a 2022 Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright. Later in 2022, she was also given the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award for “her remarkable novels and essays and unparalleled attention to craft and humane ideals.” She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
Smith’s sixth novel, The Fraud, was published in September 2023. The story takes on many of the questions and themes familiar to her readers: race, class, and society, but—in a first for Smith—in a different time than our own. The historical novel, set in Victorian England, centers on the household of (real, historical) once-famous novelist William Ainsworth and the national fascination with the (real, historical) trial of a man claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to large inheritance. A review in Publisher’s Weekly called it, “mesmerizing” and “a triumph of historical fiction.”
Today, Smith lives in her birthplace of northwest London.
“Certain books feel like they’ve been given to you… When I was young, I remember hearing Toni Morrison and Alice Walker speak about books this way, about hearing the voices of characters, and I used to roll my eyes. But now I know what they mean. It’s a wonderful feeling.”
Subscriptions to the 2023-24 season of Portland Arts & Lectures Series, featuring Zadie Smith’s conversation with Parul Sehgal on September 21, 2023, are now available! Click here for more information.
Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a book critic at the Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. She has won awards for her criticism from the New York Press Club, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University.
