Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Zadie Smith library event in London

Award-winning novelist Zadie Smith will make a rare public appearance in London on 18 July, to read from and discuss her much-acclaimed new book NW.

In a special evening event brokered by national charity The Reading Agency, the London Borough of Camden and Penguin Books, Zadie Smith will be in conversation with Richard Godwin of the Evening Standard at Swiss Cottage Library in north west London. She will then take questions from the audience, followed by a book signing. 

NW follows four Londoners – Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan – after they've left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and complicated. Yet after a chance encounter they each find that the choices they've made, the people they once were and are now, can suddenly, rapidly unravel. A portrait of modern urban life, NW is funny, sad and urgent - as brimming with vitality as the city itself.

Councillor Tulip Siddiq, Camden’s cabinet member for culture, will introduce this special event which is part of a London-wide reading group conversation about NW this summer. In a Reading Agency brokered campaign, all London library authorities have been sent Penguin promotional materials for the novel, including free copies, an audio extract and reading guide, posters and reader review postcards. 

The aim is to encourage the capital’s biggest ever reading group engagement with a novel via The Reading Agency's Reading Groups For Everyone website (readinggroups.org), which has a special web page where NW readers can interact and post reviews: readinggroups.org/join-in-the-big-nw-reading-group-conversation.html On 1 July – as part of a week of competitions celebrating National Reading Groups Day – The Reading Agency also launched a competition in which reading groups are offered the chance to win ten tickets to the Swiss Cottage Library event – details are on readinggroups.org/news/national-reading-group-day.

Our work with writers and publishers aims to bring readers in every kind of community amazing experiences. It doesn’t get much better than meeting Zadie Smith,” says Miranda McKearney, director of The Reading Agency.

Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. She is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, and of a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006, and White Teeth was included in Time magazine's TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 list. She is also a passionate advocate for the importance of public libraries in local communities.

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