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 NWto 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”.
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