09/09/2012

Zadie Smith talks to Mariella Frostrup about her much anticipated new novel NW

Many writers grow up in public but few are a literary sensation before they've even finished their debut. Today's programme is devoted to Zadie Smith who was catapulted to stardom in 1997 while still at Cambridge when publishers had a bidding war over her unfinished manuscript. Her first novel White Teeth with its exuberant, funny and contemporary tale about friendship, love and war across three cultures and three families over three generations was worth fighting over and won many awards including The Guardian First Book, the Whitbread First Novel and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Since then she's written two further novels - The Autograph Man, which explored the nature of fame and the Orange Prize-winner On Beauty, another duelling family saga published in 2005. Her latest novel returns to the self-same streets of her debut and views the world through the eyes of the two main protagonists, school friends Leah and Natalie. It's called NW, the postcode which covers the North West of London and where Smith herself was born and brought up.

Producer: Andrea Kidd.