Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
How to pronounce Zadie Smith: zay-dee
Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. She is the author of the novels White Teeth,The Autograph Man, On Beauty and NW, as well as The Embassy of Cambodia and a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary 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 2006, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Fiction 2013. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and lives in London and New York with her husband and two children. Swing Time was published in 2016 and Feel Free, a collection of essays, in 2018.
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This is a novel based, both in plot and theme, on E. M. Forster's
Howards
End. How did you come to the idea of writing such a book? What is it that
appeals to you about Forster's work?
Forster represents one of the earliest loves of my reading life and the first
intimations I ever had of the power and beauty of this funny, artificial little
construction, the novel. I wanted to pay tribute to the influence he had on me
as a teenager, and as it was a book about Beauty, I wanted the novel also to be
a record of beautiful things I've loved—novels, pieces of music, certain human
faces, paintings, and so on. But I actually think the points where On Beauty
meets Howards End are the least interesting bits of the book for me. It was
simply a way of writing inside a certain genre: the literary update. I was
thinking of things like Graham Swift's As I lay Dying/Last Orders combo; Joyce
using the structure of the Ulysses story; Helen Fielding using Pride and
Prejudice—to mention three very disparate examples.
It was a kind of scaffolding for me, but in the end the books only meet
properly at two or three points. I suppose I still think of myself as an
apprentice, and this was the end of ...
Leila Aboulela won the first Caine Prize for African Writing and is the author of many novels. Minaret was longlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize. The Translator was one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year. ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
White Teeth
Try:
Minaret
by Leila Aboulela
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka where she attended primary and secondary schools and briefly studied Medicine and ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
On Beauty
Try:
Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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