Perhaps you cottoned onto the genius of North London native Zadie Smith from first page-turn of her first novel, White Teeth. The award-winning book was written when Smith was fresh out of Cambridge University. Since then, the now 41-year-old writer has published four more novels (including On Beauty and the most recent Swing Time) endless essays, including her revelatory collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays and at least 10 short stories.
Her short stories, that have been released through publications such as The New Yorker are yet to be collected together, until now. The Bookseller announced That her short fiction will finally be collated and pushed out under her publisher Hamish Hamilton in 2019.
And that’s not all, her publisher Simon Prosser also revealed Smith’s first historical novel is on the way. So far, most of Smith’s novelistic work has been contemporary and third-person, with the exception of first-person in Swing Time.
However, the new novel (that will follow the short story collection) will be called The Fraud and is inspired by the real events on North West London (Smith’s childhood home that she has chronicled in most of her novels, most notably NW) from the 1830s to the 1870s.
The Bookseller reports that at the time , ‘the streets of North West London still bordered fields and Kilburn’s ‘Shoot-Up Hill’ was named for a highwayman.’
Prosser said of the new venture, “In five extraordinary novels, from White Teeth to Swing Time, as well as in her vibrant short fiction, Zadie Smith has proved herself one of our greatest living chroniclers of the contemporary. So it is especially thrilling that she is for the first time writing a novel set entirely in the past. And while she is working on it I am excited that we will be able to collect, again for the first time, the very best of her many terrific short stories.”
Alongside teaching Creative Writing at NYU, Smith is the mother of two children, one of UK’s most exciting creative exports since forever, a crazy-prolific writer, quite the style icon and a fierce feminist, intent on lifting other female writers up with her.
Can you tell we love her? Well, we’re not being too subtle about it. Now, how early can we pre-order this thing?
From: Elle UK
