Zadie Smith, the acclaimed novelist, essayist and short-story writer will deliver the 11th Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture.
“Conscience and Consciousness: A Craft Talk for the People and the Person” will take place in Alumni Hall at the University of King’s College on November 6, 2024.
What are the responsibilities of a writer? How do we define the difference between political and personal writing? Is there a difference? How does the language of a creative writer differ from that of a politician or an activist or a lawyer or an advertiser? In this lecture, Zadie Smith considers how a writer might balance the tension between saying I and saying We, the people.
Zadie Smith was born in London in 1975. She read English at Cambridge, before graduating in 1997. Her award-winning first novel was White Teeth. She followed that with The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time. Her latest novel is The Fraud. She has also published three collections of essays, a collection of short stories, a play and two children’s picture books. In 2024, her books On Beauty and White Teeth were amongst the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Zadie Smith writes regularly for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. She has received many honours including the City College of New York’s Langston Hughes Medal, the St. Louis Literary Award, the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award, and the Bodley Medal. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Zadie Smith lives in London.
The Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture is a public lecture at King’s.
Seating priority is given to students (please bring student ID), with a livestream to an overflow room.
Photo of Zadie Smith by Ben Bailey-Smith
About the Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture
Fred and Elizabeth Fountain and their daughter Katharine established the Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture in 2011 to honour Alex, who died in August 2009. This exceptional gift to the college enables the King’s student body to invite a speaker of their choosing to the university each year. Previous lecturers include authors, philosophers, poets and artists.
