Zadie Smith: Swing Time - in conversation
In the summer of 2017 we welcomed Zadie Smith to the Southbank Centre to discuss her fifth novel, Swing Time.
In conversation with our Head of Literature and Spoken Word, Ted Hodgkinson, the author reflected on fiction, friendship and capturing a changing world on the page; something she would go on to do in her 2020 book of essays, Intimations, and in her latest collection Dead and Alive.
An essential writer for our times, Smith’s other novels include the multi-award-winning White Teeth (2000) and the Booker Prize shortlisted On Beauty (2005). In this fascinating discussion she talks candidly about the writing process as well as her fascination with time – ‘It’s really the only subject for me’ – as a recurring motif within her work, and for the freedom it offers a writer.
‘I’ve enjoyed being an old white guy, a strange Jewish autograph collector, an old black American woman, a young hot black guy swimming in a pool in Boston. Which was always my issue with time, that I would only get to live once, as me. In the novels I get to be all those people, and presumably offend the representatives of all those people on earth.’
Zadie Smith
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