Interview | Zadie Smith | Granta Magazine

Zadie Smith | Interview

Zadie Smith & Ted Hodgkinson

Zadie Smith on writing tighter sentences, the ‘essential hubris’ of criticism and why novelists prefer writing in their pyjamas.

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White TeethThe Autograph ManOn BeautyNW and Swing Time, as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia, two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free and the collection of short fiction Grand Union. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Photograph © Dominique Nabokov

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Ted Hodgkinson

Ted Hodgkinson is the previous online editor at Granta. He was a judge for the 2012 Costa Book Awards’ poetry prize, announced earlier this year. He managed the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany, the affiliated Gregor Von Rezzori Literary Prize and still serves as an advisor. His stories have appeared in Notes from the Underground and The Mays and his criticism in the Times Literary Supplement. He has an MA in English from Oxford and an MFA from Columbia.

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