Autumn Lecture Series 2024: People and Ideas

(Monday 18th November 2024)

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Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud (2023) as well as three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations, and a collection of short stories, Grand Union.

White Teeth won multiple awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

‘“Fiction”, Smith argues, is “a medium that must always allow itself… the possibility of expressing intimate and inconvenient truths.” Her stories are full of those truths, whether she’s imagining an immigrant living in servitude in London, villagers held hostage by armed strangers, British tourists drifting down a lazy river, or an unrepentant Billie Holiday near the end of her life.’ (New Yorker)

Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.