Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
The London Review of Books (LRB) is a British literary magazine published bimonthly that features articles and essays on fiction and non-fiction subjects, which are usually structured as book reviews.
Hysterical realism is a term coined in 2000 by English critic James Wood to describe what he sees as a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other. It is also known as recherché postmodernism.
Nicholas Laird is a Northern Irish novelist and poet.
Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Sennett has studied social ties in cities, and the effects of urban living on individuals in the modern world.
On Beauty is a 2005 novel by British author Zadie Smith, loosely based on Howards End by E. M. Forster. The story follows the lives of a mixed-race British/American family living in the United States, addresses ethnic and cultural differences in both the USA and the UK, as well as the nature of beauty, and the clash between liberal and conservative academic values. It takes its title from an essay by Elaine Scarry—"On Beauty and Being Just". The Observer described the novel as a "transatlantic comic saga".
The Book of Other People is a collection of short stories, published in 2008 by Penguin Books. Selected and edited by Zadie Smith, it contains 23 short stories by 23 different authors, among them Nick Hornby, David Mitchell, Colm Tóibín, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, as well as Smith herself. The collection, as evidenced by the title, focuses on character; the authors were simply asked to "make somebody up". It being a "charity anthology," the contributors to The Book of Other People were not compensated for their writing, and the book's proceeds were given to 826NYC, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students with their creative writing skills.
The Autograph Man, published in 2002, is the second novel by Zadie Smith. It follows the progress of a Jewish-Chinese Londoner named Alex-Li Tandem, who buys and sells autographs for a living and is obsessed with celebrities. Eventually, his obsession culminates in a meeting with the elusive American-Russian actress Kitty Alexander, a star from Hollywood's Golden Age. In 2003, the novel won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize. The novel was a commercial success, but was not as well received by readers and critics as her previous and first novel, White Teeth (2000). Smith has stated that before she started work on The Autograph Man she had writer's block.
NW is a 2012 novel by British author Zadie Smith. It takes its title from the NW postcode area in North-West London, where the novel is set. The novel is experimental and follows four different characters living in London, shifting between first and third person, stream-of-consciousness, screenplay-style dialogue, and other narrative techniques in an attempt to reflect the polyphonic nature of contemporary urban life. It was nominated for the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Remainder is a 2005 novel by British author Tom McCarthy. It is McCarthy's third published work. It was first written in 2001, although not published until 2005. The novel was later re-printed by UK publishing house Alma Books; Vintage Books printed the book in the United States. The plot revolves around an unnamed narrator who has received a large financial settlement after an accident, and his obsession with recreating half-remembered events from his life before the incident.
Morfydd Clark is a Welsh actress, her include Love & Friendship (2016), Interlude in Prague (2017), and The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019). Also on television, she played Mina Harker in Dracula (2020) and Sister Clara in His Dark Materials (2019).
Yrsa Daley-Ward is an English writer, model and actor. She is known for her debut book, Bone, as well as for her spoken-word poetry, and for being an "Instagram poet". Her memoir, The Terrible, was published in 2018, and in 2019 it won the PEN/Ackerley Prize. She co-wrote Black Is King, Beyoncé's musical film and visual album, which also serves as a visual companion to the 2019 album The Lion King: The Gift.
Grand Union: Stories is a 2019 short story collection by Zadie Smith. It was published on 3 October 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books.
Jeremy Harding is a British writer and journalist, based in the south of France.
Intimations is a 2020 collection of essays by writer Zadie Smith. Smith began writing the book around the time the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States, and completed it soon after the murder of George Floyd.
Artful is a 2012 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith and published by Hamish Hamilton. It was shortlisted for the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013.
Spring is a 2019 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith, first published by Hamish Hamilton. It was long-listed for the Orwell Prize (2020).
The Fraud is a historical novel based on the Tichborne case written by Zadie Smith and published by Penguin in 2023.
Blessings is a 2024 novel by the Nigerian author Chukwuebuka Ibeh. It was published by Penguin Random House's Viking Books imprint in 2024.
