Podcasts

The Penguin Podcast: Zadie Smith on Swing Time

Zadie Smith joins David Baddiel in the Penguin studio to talk about her latest novel, Swing Time.

14 April 2016

Zadie brings along objects including a carved wooden head, a sequinned glove and a book on Fred Astaire as she talks dancing, motherhood and the importance of knowing your roots.

'I thought it would be interesting to have a narrator who wasn't trying to present anything to anyone, who was just like an open eye, and it's everybody else you see but you don't really see her very clearly'.

Zadie Smith and David Baddiel

Zadie Smith and presenter David Baddiel

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Swing Time

  • Swing Time

  • LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017

    'Smith's finest. Extraordinary, truly marvellous' Observer

    'Superb' Financial Times 'Breathtaking' TLS 'Pitch-perfect' Daily Telegraph

    'There is still no better chronicler of the modern British family than Zadie Smith' Telegraph

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2017

    A dazzlingly exuberant novel moving from north west London to West Africa, from the critically acclaimed author of White Teeth, On Beauty and Grand Union

    Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, black bodies and black music, what it means to belong, what it means to be 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.

    Bursting with energy, rhythm and movement, Swing Time is Zadie Smith's most ambitious novel yet. It is a story about music and identity, race and class, those who follow the dance and those who lead it . . .

  • Buy the book

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia, and a collection of essays, Changing My Mind, and 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. White Teeth won multiple awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith: Grand Union, 3rd October 2019
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Zadie Smith: Adult friendships seem hopelessly diluted

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Company articles

Works from Mohsin Hamid, Arundhati Roy, Ali Smith and Zadie Smith selected for Man Booker Prize 2017 longlist

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