In her first-ever event in Dallas, Zadie Smith will be in conversation with KERA’s Krys Boyd to discuss her forthcoming novel, Swing Time, which will be released on November 15.
Zadie Smith wrote her debut novel, White Teeth, while she was a 22-year-old student at Cambridge. She became a literary wunderkind almost overnight when it won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, among several others. She followed that with The Autograph Man (2002), and then On Beauty, which won the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction. Smith writes regularly for the New Yorker and has become a celebrated cultural critic, collecting her essays in Changing My Mind.
Set in both London and Africa, Swing Time follows the lives of two brown girls who dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten either. Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them. The TV production rights to Swing Time have already been purchased by Steve Coogan's production company Baby Cow, which also produced the Oscar-nominated movie Philomena.
"Swing Time is an acidly funny, fluently global, and head-spinning novel about the quest for meaning, exaltation, and love."—Booklist (starred review)