Official Zadie A. Smith Hipster

"Where are my hipsters?"- Zadie Smith, 02.02.2011 curated by Arielle

[zadiehipster]

In the Woman of the Hour podcast, Zadie Smith recently detailed how she had to curb her internet use if she wanted to write books. She almost always has an “away” message on her email and uses an old fashioned flip phone that doesn’t have an internet connection. “It’s the action of an addict,” Smith told podcast host Lena Dunham. “I’ll go down a Beyoncé Google hole for 4 hours … anything but write. First I got the flip phone, it has nothing on it, it barely texts … (then) I found something online which takes social media off your computer.” She also uses internet blocking software Self Control, Freedom and Brown Noise to block out sound.

Brigid Delaney in The Guardian

[zadiehipster]

Lena talks about work with Zadie Smith, Mara Brock Akil, Jenni Konner and many more.

[zadiehipster]

Congrats to Zadie Smith, whose White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012) placed at numbers 25 and 54, respectively.

[zadiehipster]

The problem with the argument that all realism is naïve is that it assigns to both parties in the literary exchange – the reader and the writer – an almost childlike innocence in the face of literary artifice. I’ve been guilty of this myself. As if only writing that calls attention to its own constructed and artificial nature can be considered writing-without-illusion. Behind this idea lurks a puritan instinct that I think abhors the mixed and fundamentally impure material we work with: language. Like many writers I definitely have this puritan instinct within me, this dream of a writing that would be pure form, or pure sound, or purely logical, or purely refer to itself. That would never smuggle values and prejudices through the back door: a language that is clear-eyed, stripped of ‘belief’, utterly material. But as I get older and keep writing I find this dream, too, to be a kind of illusion, and perhaps just as large an illusion as the dream of perfect Stendhalesque mimesis, that is, of believing your prose could be a pane of glass through which reality is perfectly reflected.

Interview with Zadie Smith | The White Review

[zadiehipster]

The Writers Studio will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Pushcart Prize with a stellar line-up, including fiction writers Zadie Smith, Colum McCann, and Ben Marcus; poets Sharon Olds and Philip Schultz; poet/memoirist Mary Karr; and poet/novelist and President of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jonathan Galassi. Pushcart Prize’s founder and editor Bill Henderson will introduce the evening.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 7 p.m:

Village Community School, 272 West 10th Street (between Greenwich St. and Washington St.), NYC

$10 at the door

[zadiehipster]

When my brothers and I would type out stories, famous stories, like Agatha Christie stories. In my brother’s case, he typed out entire comedy routines. There’s nothing original in that habit. I think sometimes kids who want to write put a lot of emphasis on finding their voice. But that was not my experience. My experience was just copying — very, very closely — other people’s stuff. I think it’s quite typical of writers. The emphasis is on the sentences themselves, not on you finding some unique voice.

Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips and Aleksandar Hemon on reading and writing - Home | Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel | CBC Radio

Be sure to click through and listen to the entire episode.

[zadiehipster]

Zadie Smith has said her new novel, her first since 2012’s NW, concerns itself with “tap dancing, blackness, and time.” The author shared two chapters of the unpublished work Tuesday night with a full crowd at Johns Hopkins University.

The forthcoming novel, Swing, Time, is about “two brown girls,” Smith said—both biracial, both dancers, who grow up together in a poor London neighborhood but diverge in adulthood in the 1990s. The feistier one, Tracy, pursues dancing professionally, while the unnamed first-person narrator becomes a personal assistant to a pop star.

[zadiehipster]

The author is so coolly observant, so amusing and penetrating, so adept at pinpointing things that the rest of us miss that it's not hard to feel a bit off-balance at the same moment you're being drawn closer.

I've met her several times and yup, she's so smart and perceptive that it makes talking to her very intimidating.

[zadiehipster]

Author Zadie Smith Captivates Her Audience in Tolles Lecture - Hamilton College

Zadie Smith held the Chapel audience captivated throughout the 2015 Tolles Lecture. Attendees hung onto her every word as she read what she called “Two Essays About Being A Person.”

[timdegier]

Moments with Zadie Smith

Half a year ago, I interviewed Zadie Smith and accidentally turned off my recording.

(Foto by Jan Postma)

Keep reading

[suchhumanthings-deactivated2015]

She had that thing most people don’t have - curiosity. She might not have always got the right answers, but she wanted to ask the questions. It’s very hard if you are interested in ideas and all that, ideas and the philosophies of the past, it’s very hard to find someone around here to really talk to. That’s the tragedy of the thing really I mean, when you think about it. Certainly I can’t find anyone around here to talk to anymore.

Zadie Smith, NW (via suchhumanthings)

[zadiehipster]

Zadie Smith, English novelist and Royal Society of Literature fellow, will speak as part of the Tolles Lecture series on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 8 p.m., in the Chapel. The lecture is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a book-signing and reception in Dwight Lounge, Bristol Center.

Smith’s acclaimed first novel, White Teeth, is a vibrant portrait of contemporary multicultural London, told through the story of three ethnically diverse families. The novel won the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and two BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards. White Teeth was also adapted for television in 2002 by Channel 4 and has been translated into over 20 languages. Smith served as writer-in-residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and subsequently published as editor an anthology of sex writing, Piece of Flesh (ICA, 1999), as the culmination of this role.

Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man, a story of loss, obsession and the nature of celebrity, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Prize for Fiction. In 2003 and 2013 Smith was named by Granta as one of 20 best young British authors. The second novel was followed by another, On Beauty, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

Smith is currently a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University.

The Tolles Lecture was established in 1991 by members of the class of 1951 in memory of Winton Tolles, class of 1928 and dean of the college from 1947 to 1972. It brings to the Hamilton campus distinguished writers in the fields of literature, journalism and theater to lecture and meet with students.

[chrismyersinc]

Listening to this lovely podcast between Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and here’s a great bit I had to transcribe on “finding your purpose”. Wanted to to share with y'all fellow young artist types especially:

CA: When I was 25 I didn’t think in those terms. I didn’t think in that language of ‘I want to find my purpose’. I would advise very strongly that you not think in those terms. It just clouds your head, and you start thinking ‘I have to find my purpose’. I think you should just live. Life is short, do your thing, you just never know, follow what you love… follow what can give you a job so you can eat. There’s something about our culture, everywhere in the world, that makes people think about ‘find your purpose’ and it’s just – why?

ZS: Yes, and young people who want to do something creative, they spend all this time scouring websites for advice. Like, ‘What does XYZ do?’. But if you ask people who are writers or who make anything, their obsession was art: reading, watching films, listening to music… it was being at the source of the thing, not these ridiculous lists of sundry advice.

CA: I wrote “Purple Hibiscus” - yes I was young - but I wrote it because I loved writing - it was my first love. It was what made me happy when it went well. It was what I just deeply loved. I was working, I was going to school, but every night I would stay up till 2 in the morning because I loved writing “Purple Hibiscus”.

ZS: There might be one thing there which is an aspect of pure luck. To really love something is a gift. It’s not that common. Sometimes it’s hard for people to find the thing that they love. It seems natural when you love something.

[zadiehipster]

These are just some of the gems contained in this conversation, so if you missed it the first two times I posted it, I highly suggest you listen whenever you get a chance.

[zadiehipster]

Novelist Zadie Smith named University of Calgary’s Distinguished Visiting Writer, will visit in February | Calgary Herald

British novelist Zadie Smith will give a reading at the University of Calgary as part of its Distinguished Visiting Writer program.

The author, whose debut novel White Teeth turned her into a literary star in 2000, will visit U of C’s MacEwan Hall on Feb. 11.

White Teeth, which followed the friendship and family life of a Bangladeshi and Englishman, was subject to a fierce bidding war before publication. It was an instant bestseller and received rave reviews and a Guardian First Book Award for the author.

She has since written three more novels, including 2002’s The Autograph Man and 2013’s The Embassy of Cambodia, about an Ivory Coast refugee working for a wealthy London couple as a nanny.

Smith teaches fiction writing at New York University.

Past authors in U of C’s Distinguished Visiting Writer program have included Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman and Michael Ondaatje.

Tickets for the event are free and will become available Oct. 21 at noon. Visit ucalgary.ca/cdwp/

[zadiehipster]

Smith also emphasized that writing is for everyone, despite sometimes being perceived as an elitist art form. “In New York, often the answer to ‘Why write?’ is ‘Because I can afford it,’” she said. In refutation, Smith highlighted art forms such as jazz and hip-hop, which were founded primarily by members of African-American communities of low socio-economic status. She emphasized that these art forms spawned even more creative genres such as beat boxing, funk, rap and spoken word. Smith praised creators of such art forms for their originality yet lamented that contemporary artists working within these same genres have turned their sights on profits rather than personal fulfillment. For example, she noted how Kanye West is a “restless, radical and forward-thinking” artist who allows his image to be a commercial one. She also bemoaned that one of West’s biggest hero’s is Steve Jobs — someone who sought to use his creativity with a goal of earning money. “Books are sold as products, but we can refuse the form of identifying them as productions,” Smith said. “The most radical thing to do is to refuse — the refusal of business as usual.”

The Oberlin Review : Zadie Smith Lectures on Ethics of Writing

[zadiehipster]

Smith emphasized how writers should refuse to see their work as part of capitalist systems of production. Jackson Smith continued in this vein, highlighting how African-American creative writing has historically been used to refuse and fight back against oppressive systems. “As a child of the Black arts movement and the Black Power movement, literature was at the center of everything, as it has been for African Americans since the beginning of time on this continent,” she said. “In the face of violence of the enslavement period, Africans in the diaspora utilized writing as a liberating tool. …And in the 1960s there were never any political meetings without poetry and music, and most of the writers who arose from that period clearly foregrounded ideas of resistance. … Creative writing is life blood and an actual extension of both the aesthetics and political realities of Black experiences.”

The Oberlin Review : Zadie Smith Lectures on Ethics of Writing

[nicollekidman]

Master Class in Fiction Zadie Smith, M 11:00am-1:40pm What does “having a sensibility,” literary or otherwise, mean? Is it something you can acquire, or something innate, or something else again? We’re going to read a selection of 20th century novels concentrating on whatever is most particular to them, in the hope that this might help us understand whatever is most particular to us. The course will be punctuated by secondary readings of literary criticism and philosophy. Writers include: Vladimir Nabokov, Muriel Spark and Franz Kafka. Note: this class has a great deal of reading and no “creative writing.” The aim is to learn how to read well. To this end, you will produce critical writing, in the form of short literary essays that address the novels we read. This class believes that good writers are first of all good readers.

honestly….. honestly….. tbh……