Zadie Smith told an audience at a literary festival that she mostly reads books written by women, the Guardian reports.
Smith, the author of novels including White Teeth and The Fraud, appeared at the Cambridge Literary Festival in England on Sunday to discuss her latest book, the essay collection Dead and Alive, published last October by Penguin Press. In the book, she writes about authors she admires, including Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and A.S. Byatt.
Speaking to the festival audience, Smith said, “I don’t know when I read men anymore. It does happen sometimes, but it’s completely flipped compared to the reading I did when I was young.”
She continued, “Being a woman and getting older, you become enormously impatient with anything other than other older women. All I read now is Helen Garner because I want wisdom.”
Smith did offer praise for some male writers. “I have read some really good [novels] recently, actually by millennial men,” she said, “really fascinating, balls-to-the-wall novels—I think they’ve got nothing to lose so they’re like, ‘let’s do this.’”
Asked about the women writers she praises in Dead and Alive, she responded, “I was born in 1975, and what’s happened since then in women’s art is so cheering and so extraordinary, that I just wanted to log it.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
