LONDON'S LEADING LADY: ZADIE SMITH
from We Love this Book
Zadie Smith, who shot to literary fame aged 25 with her
debut White Teeth, talks
to us about London and writing
One
of the most eagerly awaited literary offerings this autumn is NW, the new novel from
Zadie Smith. It’s a return to the fertile north-west London setting of her
hugely successful debut White
Teeth. Fittingly, we meet at The Paradise Club on Kilburn Lane,
about a mile from where Smith grew up in Willesden and where, earlier this
summer, she gave the first public reading of NW
to an enthusiastic audience of booksellers.
It’s been seven years since her last novel,
the Orange Prize-winning On
Beauty. Smith explains that she wrote the first few pages of NW that long ago, “and
just got stuck there for a really long time, about five years”. That is usually
the way with her books, but “it was a longer struggle than usual”.
1 comment:
I'm so ambivalent about Zadie Smith. She's an author I want to love, I can see the wit and clear mind, but her characters never quite make it to three dimensional for me, and so don't allow me to lose myself in her story.
Does anyone else have that issue with her? Andrea Levy's works are the same.
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