Zadie Smith, the bestselling author who took the literary world by storm with her debut novel “White Teeth” in 2000, will receive this year’s Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.
Smith will receive the honor during a gala and dinner in New York City on Nov. 8. Held at the iconic Mandarin Oriental New York, the evening will kick off at 6:30 p.m. Tickets for the event, which raises money for scholarships and fellowships, can be purchased online.
Nicole Terez Dutton, editor of the Kenyon Review, called Smith an excellent craftsman, clear-eyed thinker and generous teacher who engages in fearless, critical writing — and so much more.
“She is relentless and exquisite in her attempts to track the contradictions and depths of issues, histories and stories,” Dutton said. “Her essays and fictions usefully complicate and expand what we expect literature to do, and that is one of our editorial priorities at The Review.”
The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement was established in 2002 to honor careers of extraordinary literary achievement and to recognize writers whose influence has shaped the American literary landscape. It celebrates writers for the courage of their vision, their unparalleled imagination, and for the beauty of their art.
Past winners include Kenyon alum E.L. Doctorow ’52 GP’08 H’76 as well as Margaret Atwood, W.S. Merwin, Rita Dove, Joyce Carol Oates, Seamus Heaney and last year’s recipient, Walter Mosely. David Lynn ’76, professor emeritus of English and editor emeritus of the Kenyon Review, won the award in 2021.
The event serves as the Review’s central fundraising effort for the year and provides significant support to scholarships for its residential and online workshop participants, highly competitive programs that serve young and adult writers.
“Historically, we’ve focused our support on the young writers — because offering talented youth opportunities to explore their potential and to be in community with other writers at this pivotal moment in their development is transformational,” Dutton said. “In more recent years, we’ve come to understand how affirming it is for adult writers to enjoy the same kind of rigor and support in a community of writers.”
Funds from the event — which includes alumni, current students, writers, editors, parents and College trustees — also support the Review’s fellowship program. Fellows serve two-year terms at the Review as part of its senior editorial team and also work as creative writing instructors in the English department.
As this year’s honoree, Smith comes with a distinguished career. The author of six novels, including “The Fraud” in 2023, she has been hailed as a modern-day Charles Dickens. Born in north-west London, where she still lives, Smith also has written a novella; three collections of essays; a collection of short stories, “Grand Union;” and the play, “The Wife of Willesden.”
Smith has won numerous other literary awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is a regular contributor for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.