A conversation with the acclaimed author about her new essay collection, Dead and Alive.
There are few authors who have been famous for half their lives. Zadie Smith is one of those rare figures. When her debut novel, White Teeth, was published in 2000, it was met with critical praise, and Smith was ushered into the canon of British literature. Over the ensuing 25 years, she has demonstrated her creativity and versatility by publishing six novels, one collection of short stories, a play, a children’s book, and many essays. Like her other works of nonfiction, her new collection, Dead and Alive, explores the subtle details of art, the complexities of grief, and the political upheavals of our era. Although the book encompasses essays published between 2016 and 2025, taken together, they present cultural criticism and political commentary in a plummier tone than the murkiness that was brewing in the US and the UK throughout those years. Smith’s urgency in publishing Dead and Alive stems from her desire to honor the dead by showing how we collectively can keep more people alive.
Early on in the foreword, Smith encourages readers to approach the essays with curiosity, to think critically with both gratitude and compassion. She openly shares her thoughts on society’s ambivalence toward aging while pointing to the material gaps that shape intergenerational conflict. Well aware of the stakes of discourse, Smith acknowledges the enormity of the devastation in Gaza while respecting the ethics of political debate. With sharp prose, she demonstrates why essays matter: They offer the writer a framework to challenge conformity in thought.
I spoke with Smith about her new collection in early October. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
—Edna Bonhomme
EB: This year marks the 25th anniversary of your debut novel, White Teeth. Set in the working-class suburb of Willesden in northwest London, White Teeth follows the lives of best friends Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. You were praised as a modern-day Charles Dickens. How does it feel to have your work included in the canon?
ZS: I don’t think I’m very Dickensian. It’s an alienating thought. Even realizing that 25 years had passed surprised me. When you’re writing, you have to understand that time moves in strange ways. You get tunnel vision, and I didn’t realize how much time had gone by. Now, here we are. It’s a shock, but a good one. It’s always nice to have written, and I’m glad I did. It feels like we’re talking about someone else.
EB: You are first and foremost a novelist, but you have also excelled at writing nonfiction, with an emphasis on dissecting literature and art. How does essay writing differ from novel writing?
ZS: Essay writing feels like someone prompts me. I’m pretty lazy, so it’s like when someone emails me and says, “Do this.” It’s similar to homework, but it helps me build structure. Otherwise, my day is just sitting around, trying to imagine things. Writing a novel is an isolated activity; I love creating fiction, but right now, I’m about to go see Kerry James Marshall’s show in London. That excites me because it’s an object right in front of me—real, in the world, art created by a human. I can think about it; I’m not just stuck with myself. That’s part of the joy of being in the world—stretching into new corners. So, I enjoy writing essays. They can be challenging at times; it’s mental work, whereas writing novels feels more like soul work. They’re more emotional and vulnerable.
EB: Northwest London has been a source of inspiration for your creative and nonfiction work. And you’ve returned to live in the neighborhood where you grew up. Langston Hughes’s poem “Homecoming” comes to mind, where he states:
I went back in the alley
And I opened up my door.
All her clothes was gone:
She wasn’t home no more
The poem focuses on the pain of lost romantic love and the heartbreak that arises in a familiar setting. Like many cities in the West, London has significantly changed, especially as working-class people and folks of color have been pushed out, primarily due to the destruction of affordable housing and universal social programs. What has it been like for you to return to your hometown?
ZS: My corner of London feels like a split-screen reality. I live on a street near the one where I was born in Queen’s Park, which resembles Park Slope in New York—a gentrified, affluent neighborhood. Unlike in America, the schools are still run by the government. But if I turn left from my door, I’m in Kilburn High Road—where I also grew up—which is poorer than ever. There’s no shortage of Black people when you go left; they’re just extremely poor. It’s strange to see. When I was younger, my mom ran a sort of youth group—probably for troubled kids or those just out of their homes—in the middle of Kilburn High Road. I spent a lot of my childhood there, surrounded by those kids. This summer, it’s all been torn down and replaced by shops. This is depressing, because I grew up in a world with many state-supported opportunities. It’s hard to watch things regress and see the middle disappear while the extremes grow more intense at both ends, but it’s the same story across Europe.
EB: Given the disappearance of the pillars that were meant to address the gaps between social classes, do you feel a sense of loss from the London you grew up in or a disconnection by these socioeconomic shifts?
ZS: Somewhat, I feel pity. My kids attend the same schools I went to, and those schools are less funded, making it more challenging. Even when I think about my son’s school, it feels like I attended an entirely different school. I played about nine different instruments, all for lessons paid for with minimal government funding every week. If I say that to kids in this neighborhood now, they wouldn’t know what I was talking about. It’s strange to see things that were possible and available 30 years ago become unavailable now. That’s not the way you expect community progress to happen.
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EB: You begin Dead and Alive by citing Jacques Derrida’s Of Hospitality, a collection of seminars he gave that reflects on not just the foreigner as someone outside understanding but the theme of possibility. You write that “this freedom is absolute.” In today’s world, where foreignness is vilified and criminalized, that kind of freedom of thought doesn’t match the reality we face. What was on your mind when you introduced this idea?
ZS: To me, it’s simply about understanding reality, dealing with it, accepting it, and finding ways to make it more bearable. I don’t believe in perfect societies. That’s a thing that right-wing thought tends to promote—this idea of absolute perfection in society. I don’t believe in that, and I’m not even sure I’d want to live in such a society. I’m interested in what makes people’s lives humane and manageable. They can’t be perfected, but it is within our power to make lives more bearable. And that’s what I think about when I consider the immigrant.
My mother was an immigrant, and I believe that when she came here [to the United Kingdom], her life was far from perfect. However, there were systems in place that made our lives bearable and more tolerable for new arrivals than they are now. The little hospitality my mother received has now been revoked.
That’s what interests me: people’s lack of imagination. If you only believe in ideal states, you don’t spend much time trying to build just ones. So I’m always thinking about what can be done and what is reasonable—what kind of hospitality can be offered, what can be understood. What do we owe these strangers, knowing always that the possibility of becoming a stranger is in front of all of us right now? The climate crisis means any of us could be a stranger tomorrow.
EB: Dead and Alive is organized thematically rather than chronologically. From your section on “Eyeballing,” which has several essays that invite the reader to observe with care, to “Confessing,” which tempts the reader to question superficial understandings of multiculturalism. How did you decide on the book’s curatorial approach?
ZS: I say what I see. This is about observing things, this is about thinking about things. This is about confessing or speaking from the heart. I don’t overthink those things. Much of what I do is subconscious. I’m trying not to get in my own way. That’s risky too because it can be embarrassing. A lot of what I write, I think, might be embarrassing to others. But that’s part of the risk. People tend to be very careful, or they’re thinking about their careers. But when I write, I just genuinely focus on what I’m creating. I try to keep that mindset. I know I have a job, of course, but I try not to think about that when I’m writing. When I picked those essay sections, it was just like what you do as a kid: say what you see. And that’s exactly what I saw when I looked at them.
EB: In your essay, “Toyin Ojih Odultola’s Vision of Power,” you take us on a visual journey. The essay focuses on her work, A Countervailing Theory, an exhibition that draws on ethnic communities in present-day Plateau State in Nigeria. At first, it seems like a close reading of a prominent and deeply visual artist. However, you go beyond the surface by considering the social context that influences Ojih’s thinking—the Eshu rule over Koba—and encourage us to reflect on the “mutual melancholy that pervades asymmetric relationships of power.” Yet, this isn’t just about labor or power; it also explores how love can be radical through ideas like Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary humanism. To what extent do you see this project reflected in the work of contemporary artists, and can visual media help guide us toward a more compassionate way of life?
ZS: I don’t really expect anyone to agree with me, but I must admit my ability to persuade is very limited. This also relates to a sense of sensitivity, like many political issues. The idea of having control over others is horrifying to me—I don’t want it or desire it. I understand, though, that many people feel differently. Many are attracted to power—having it, holding it, wielding it over others. I also recall a realistic aspect that influenced my thinking when I was young: I grew up in a working-class community within a large housing estate, where people often came to us for various reasons, including those associated with the IRA, Marxists, and others. I was always aware that, for some, the proletariat—who we were—wanted a different kind of proletariat. They had an idea of us that wasn’t really us. They wanted us to be better or to have a cleaner ideology. How can we speak to people we oppose without treating them with contempt? That’s my concern. I don’t think these complex ideas are beyond anyone’s understanding.
EB: Intergenerational conflict is the focus of your essay “The Instrumentalist,” which discusses the film Tár. You say that every generation mistakes its own view for the whole world. But what happens when generational views clash? According to your framing, at least in one footnote, millennials see your generation as “irrelevant, politically obtuse.” If we accept that blunt and cheeky comment, I wonder how I, as a millennial speaking to you, fit into that. Are there other ways people can communicate across generations to better understand each other’s views and experiences?
ZS: To me, it’s all about economics and structure. When I think about the generation above me—when we were kids in the ’90s—they would talk about the ’60s, and our attitude was that it was nice they participated politically through their music, sex, and drugs. We thought they were a little silly, but it wasn’t a hateful feeling. Why? Because structurally, we were heading into decent jobs; we had the possibility of housing and a future. So the fact that our elders seemed cringeworthy and ridiculous was OK. I didn’t have this kind of existential worry. In contrast, it makes complete sense to me that this generational conflict between millennials [and Gen X] turns violent when the former is wholly cut off from the future that the latter took for granted. It’s an economic issue. Of course, it’s silly, but I was just interested in the structural, economic causes of that. If there’s any violence, it’s because your generation [millennials] has been so deeply screwed that the kind of sentimental eye roll I might have had for the generation above me isn’t sentimental anymore—it’s a matter of life or death.
EB: I am fascinated by how you navigate the different boundaries of literature and society, fostering compassion for others. Yet, there is a long history of viewing “the other” as nothing more than a caricature, which you acknowledge. How does one navigate a literary world where some believe that expanding representation and including more diverse voices is a threat to technical style and careful writing?
ZS: There’s no answer to what you just said. All of those things are true. I can absolutely stop writing the novels I write if people don’t want to read them—that’s fine. I think only the reader can answer it. You can only answer it with the book in front of you. Some books, you’re always going to throw across the room. People want data; they want a statistical and factual answer about what fiction could be written and what shouldn’t. All of us, as readers, know that’s not how it works. The explanation of the intimacy you feel in a certain kind of book—I just don’t understand what logic supports that. The only reason I wrote that essay is that, in an age when everyone is speaking for their community, I thought, ‘Let me give a half-cheer for my community, for writers.’ Let me at least not defend them but just explain them, with the understanding that if readers’ tastes change and they genuinely only want to read novels about my life and what happens in it, then so be it. It’s not a prescriptive thing as far as I’m concerned. Readers will decide.
EB: The section in the book called “Reconsidering” includes two essays on Palestine: In “Trump Gaza Number One,” you comment on Donald Trump’s AI-generated vision of a postwar Gaza, and in “Shibboleth,” which was first published in 2024, you discuss the student protests against Israel’s war. You acknowledge that the students deserve admiration, support, and praise, but you also point out that they rely on a series of shibboleths, such as the word Zionist, adding: “as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920.” Can you elaborate on navigating the various spaces of political language amid the physical devastation unfolding?
ZS: The ongoing nature of the language is evident. For example, when Netanyahu describes those who don’t leave [Gaza] as terrorists, he’s using language as a weapon, and it’s also fantastical. It’s as if saying something makes it true. The people who can’t leave Gaza now aren’t terrorists just because he says they are. That kind of language insults us all—politically, logically, and philosophically.
I’m always aware of this kind of language, primarily when it’s used as a weapon to make assumptions on a large scale. To justify killing, those individuals have to be seen as nothing. This is fundamentally a philosophical and linguistic move.
My point, which no one cares about, is that in the pursuit of justice, I don’t need to turn anyone into something unrecognizable. I understand why some want to do that, but when I think of a future where everyone has their full social and political rights in one state, the language that would enable that must evolve. We need to see everyone as human beings, each with their own unique traumas and histories.
When I wrote the “Shibboleth” piece, I was just reading: There was a particular student at that time, he was [at] Columbia, and he stated that Zionists don’t deserve to live. Someone asked, “Do you see anything wrong with that?” And he said, “No.” And that’s absolutely within his right to say, but for me, that rhetoric isn’t OK. The content of politics is how to keep more people from dying. That’s the first job. Then there are many other jobs after that—stop selling these weapons, prevent these people from being killed. If I didn’t speak in the form that others want, I’m sorry, but my principle is that I don’t believe the fight for justice has to involve minimizing anybody’s pain.
EB: The book also includes an essay called “Agelessness.” Why did you think it was important to talk about aging and how you are undergoing that?
ZS: I’m always intrigued, especially in the West, by how people think about age. Many people, particularly in America, have a very distorted view of aging. When I was 47, if I said I was middle-aged, an American would say, “Don’t say that.” I’d ask, “What do you mean? How old do you think we’re gonna live? If that isn’t middle age, then what is?” I then realized that people can genuinely ignore a lot of reality. It’s crazy. I didn’t even realize how fast I would turn 50. I blinked, and I was 24; now I’m 50. Some Americans think they won’t get old, or even more, believe they won’t die. Some of the supposedly more intelligent Americans really think death can be defeated. That’s wild, because if they believe that, they’ll do anything.
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I always try to remind myself of human limits—not to be a downer or negative, but because it’s the truth. Societies can’t be perfect. You will die. Everyone ages. These are simple ideas, and they shouldn’t even be unusual to say.
EB: In your section on mourning, you cite Joan Didion and discuss how to reckon with the emotional weight of bereavement.
ZS: I believe American society is unaccustomed to handling death sensibly, and when it happens, it feels overwhelming. There’s distant death, always foreign death, always poor people dying somewhere else. But not in America. When I returned to England [after living in New York City], I felt like I was back where people accept that they will die, and that was a relief.
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