Nick Laird & Zadie Smith talk to John Mullan

Queen’s Park residents Zadie Smith and Nick Laird read from their latest books and talk about their work and teaching at New York University.

Zadie’s most recent book Feel Free is a collection of essays. Nick’s novel Modern Gods is just out in paperback and his new poetry collection Feel Free is due to be published in August.

They will discuss writing, reading, poetry and teaching with John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London and regular contributor to the Guardian.

‘A writer so insistent on the possibility of imaginative connection, so generous and curious with regard to her readers’
Evening Standard

‘Laird has written a truly superb novel exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of forgiveness’
Publishers Weekly

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free. 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 literary 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.

Nick Laird

Born in County Tyrone in 1975, Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and former lawyer. His poetry collections are To A Fault, On Purpose and Go Giants. A new volume is forthcoming in 2018. His novels are Utterly Monkey, Glover’s Mistake and Modern Gods. Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Somerset Maugham award, the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he co-edited the anthology The Zoo of the New with Don Paterson, and is currently a Writer-in-Residence at New York University.