Summary
Zadie Smith talks dance, depicting teenage friendships and US/UK differences with Philip Dodd as her new novel Swing Time is published in Britain and BBC TV dramatises her book NW starring Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox.
Producer: Robyn Read
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Hello and welcome to the arts and ideas download |
| 0:34.9 | from the free thinking team at the BBC. |
| 0:38.4 | I first met her when she was in her mid-20s. |
| 0:42.2 | I invited her to be writer-in-residence at London's ICA, where I was then director. |
| 0:47.9 | Even then, she valued independence of thought. |
| 0:51.5 | Transgression wasn't necessarily a virtue, she argued, to the consternation of some. |
| 0:57.2 | That independence of thought and feeling continues to mark her writing. She has shown immense |
| 1:03.5 | admiration for E.M. Foster, as well as the radical novelist David Foster Wallace, has remained |
| 1:09.4 | in her imagination loyal to northwest London where she was |
| 1:13.2 | born at the same time as her fiction has spread its wings to encompass the globe as does her new |
| 1:19.7 | novel Swing Time. My guest this evening in extended interview is Zadie Smith. White Teeth was her first novel which was tagged as a comedy of life |
| 1:30.8 | in Multicultural London and for which she was paid in advance while a Cambridge student. On Beauty |
| 1:36.5 | translated the values and grammar of V.M. Forster's Howard's end to the US. NW recently turned into |
| 1:44.0 | a television film by the BBC was an experimental |
| 1:47.1 | novel about much else female friendship across class in northwest London. Swingtime too begins with |
| 1:56.0 | female friendship. There's the unnamed narrator, daughter of a working classclass couple, black mother, white father, who loves dance. |
| 2:03.6 | And her friend Tracy are much more talented, but in the end failed dancer from the same neighbourhood. |
| 2:10.6 | But Swingtime merely sets out from recognisable Zadie Smith territory. |
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