Literary Birthday – 27 October – Zadie Smith

Happy Birthday, Zadie Smith, born on 27 October 1975.

Zadie Smith Quotes

1. The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
2. Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
3. A writer’s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
4. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
5. Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
6. The past is always tense, the future perfect.
7. The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.

Read: Zadie Smith’s 10 Rules For Writing Fiction

Zadie Smith is an award-winning British novelist. She began writing poems and stories as a child and later studied English literature at the University of Cambridge. Her first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of The Whitbread First Novel Award, The Guardian First Book Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and The Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award. Her best known work is perhaps her novel, On Beauty. Other books include The Embassy of Cambodia and Swing Time. She has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2002. She explores race, religion, and cultural identity in her novels. Her writing is known for its quirky characters, clever humour, and sharp dialogue. In 2023, she published The Fraud, a work of historical fiction. In 2023 Smith was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Source for image: David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0 <>, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zadie_Smith_NBCC_2011_Shankbone.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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