Nick Laird and Zadie Smith
My appreciation for the writing of Zadie Smith began January 30, 2007 at Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road. I spotted the most beautiful book cover I’d ever seen, for a book called On Beauty. I bought the book without knowing anything about Smith, saved the receipt as a bookmark, and started reading it on the plane back to the States. With writing as beautiful as the cover, my heart broke for Kiki and I was infuriated with Howard—but more than that, I was astonished at the depth of the characters’ nuances and motivations.
Fast forward two years and I stumbled on the writing of Nick Laird in much the same way. Shelving books at Borders Books & Music, the story told through illustrations on the cover of Glover’s Mistake caught my eye. Then, the multi-layered story of James, David, and Ruth and their life in London drew me in and I couldn’t put the book down.
It was a quick reference to Zadie Smith on the acknowledgments page of that book, and then a brief name-check of “Nicky Laird” while reading White Teeth a few months later when I started putting two and two together. Nick Laird and Zadie Smith could be added to the list of literary power couples who live, write, and edit together.
Known collectively for their novels, poetry, short stories, and essays, they met when Laird was editor of The Mays anthologies (a collection of writing from the students of Oxford and Cambridge) and Smith submitted her writing for consideration. Laird, who has written four collections of poetry, three novels, and has several other projects in the works, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize for his most recent collection of poetry, Feel Free, and is a professor of poetry at Queen’s University in Belfast and at New York University. Smith is a tenured professor of fiction at NYU and is the author of five novels, three essay collections, and a collection of short stories. In addition to splitting their time between writing and teaching, they also split their time between New York City and London.
Laird’s most recent novel, , hits on the intersection of politics, religion, and culture in a captivating tale of reinvention, and Smith’s newest (2018) and (2020) address similar topics with the same level of depth and nuance as , so that’s where we began our conversation.
