Acclaimed author Zadie Smith will be honored in person at The Westport Library with the inaugural Westport Prize for Literature.
The Westport Prize for Literature is an annual prize established to honor an original work of fiction that explores issues in contemporary society. Smith was recognized this year for The Fraud, described by publisher Penguin Random House as “a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story — and who gets to be believed.”
Smith will be signing copies of The Fraud following her conversation with Trey Ellis.
All tickets have been sold for this event, but we are accepting spots on the waitlist. Please register HERE to join the waitlist. Registration includes a copy of the book and costs $29, covering either one or two attendees.
Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as the novella The Embassy of Cambodia. In addition, she has written three collections of essays — Changing My Mind, Feel Free, and Intimations — a collection of short stories, Grand Union, and the play, The Wife of Willesden, and is the editor of The Book of Other People.
Among her many honors, Smith has been awarded the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction for On Beauty, the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award for White Teeth, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Feel Free, and the Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright for The Wife of Willesden.
She is also a three-time nominee for the esteemed Booker Prize, and just last year was honored with the PEN America Literary Service Award.
Trey Ellis is an American Book Award-winning novelist, two-time Emmy and Peabody winning filmmaker, NAACP Image award-winning playwright, essayist and professor of professional practice at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His acclaimed first novel, Platitudes, was reissued by Northeastern University Press along with his influential essay, “The New Black Aesthetic.” He is currently in rehearsals for a musical on the life of Dorothy Dandridge for which he wrote the book and is co-writer of the lyrics. “A Night of the Music” from the musical was performed at Carnegie Hall.
Click here to listen to Smith discuss The Fraud, gender inequality, class divisions and more on NPR's Fresh Air with host Terry Gross.