Zadie Smith on why art matters in times of crisis

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An Evening with Zadie Smith

When: Thursday, Oct. 15, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, 6265 Crescent Rd., UBC

Tickets: From $30 at tickets.ubc.ca

In Art For Our Sakes, an essay published in June in The New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith argues that making art need not address a political crisis directly to have social or political value. In a culture increasingly shaped by machine thinking and propaganda, she sees the human act of creating art as meaningful in itself.

It was an encouragement, the British novelist and essayist says, for artists to have faith “that their habit of making art is powerful and meaningful, especially in times of crisis.”

Her argument is especially pertinent to the novel she is currently writing. Smith has described the present moment as a “hellscape,” but her new book doesn’t confront it head-on.

“It’s about a school trip to Moscow, January 1990,” she says. “I didn’t say it had nothing to do with it, I said it didn’t deal directly. Indirection, though… indirection can be very useful, for a novelist.”

Smith first came to prominence with the 2000 publication of her first novel, White Teeth. The sprawling, multigenerational portrait of multicultural London became an international bestseller and won the Whitbread First Novel Award, among other honours.

Now 50, Smith has built a wide-ranging body of work encompassing six novels, short fiction, plays and several collections of essays. Her most recent novel, the historical fiction The Fraud, appeared in 2023, followed by the 2025 essay collection Dead And Alive.

The latter gathers essays from recent years into five sections — Eyeballing, Considering, Reconsidering, Mourning and Confessing — moving among art, film, literature, politics and Smith’s own life. The Mourning section remembers writers including Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Martin Amis and Hilary Mantel, while the more personal Confessing includes essays on aging, writing The Fraud and Smith’s adolescence.

In The Fall, Smith revisits an episode from her teenage years when she fell from her bedroom window, without imposing a tidy explanation on what happened.

“I wanted to think about volition — about human willing,” she says. “A lot of our political and cultural arguments these days are complicated because we’ve stopped believing in things like false consciousness, the subconscious, divided feelings, incomplete knowledge.”

Writing about the incident didn’t change her understanding of it. Instead, it reminded her “that teenagers are sometimes more honest about the maelstrom of instinct, narrative, self-deception and pure fear that makes up most people’s personalities.”

Even the seemingly simple act of observing other people raises questions for Smith. She says she looks at “every single person” she passes on the street, but isn’t sure whether that’s a peculiarity of writers or something everybody does.

One thing, however, has changed.

“What’s definitely different since about 2008 is that in all public situations I am the only person not looking at a device,” she says. “It’s certainly very easy to be a voyeur since 2008 because nobody notices you looking at them — they’re all looking elsewhere.”

Smith is similarly wary of simplistic expressions of national identity.

Asked whether people discover their attachment to their country when it comes under threat — as Canadians have recently found themselves contemplating in response to the Trump administration’s threats toward Canada — Smith draws a distinction between appreciating a country and loudly proclaiming its greatness.

“Fervent nationalism is the clearest sign of a country having a nervous breakdown,” she says. “When you really love a country, you don’t need to wave a flag: you’re too busy appreciating the country and the forms of life it enables.”

Canada’s current predicament, she suggests, presents a particular challenge.

“Canada is presently under attack by a country having an extremely flagrant nervous breakdown. It seems to me the challenge is not to let a drowning person pull you under.”

If the wider culture seems troubled, Smith remains optimistic about her profession. She is unsurprised that young people still want to become novelists.

“No boss, sit at home all day, make your own hours, make up stories?” she says. “It’s like being a kid. I wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world.”

What does puzzle her are aspiring writers who don’t read.

“To me, the job of writing is mostly reading,” she says. “So that always confuses me a little.”