Zadie Smith | Dead and Alive
Sun 26 Apr 2026 | 8:00pm - 9:00pm
Note: This event was originally part of the Winter Festival 2025, and has been rescheduled to the Spring Festival. Tickets for the November 2025 date are still valid for the new date in April.
Zadie Smith returns to the festival with her exhilarating new essay collection Dead and Alive, focusing her dazzling skills on the subjects that have recently captured her attention. From literary memorials for writers we’ve lost, to trips to the movies, Glastonbury and Kilburn High Road, this is a collection about everything that makes life fizz – love, loss, culture and politics. Comprising 32 essays, 12 of them previously unpublished. Throughout this thrilling collection, Zadie Smith shows us once again her unrivaled ability to think through, critically and humanely, some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.
Come and share in Zadie’s insightful and compassionate view of the world.
In conversation with Tom Gatti, Literary Editor for The Observer.
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We’re pleased to be working with The Arts Theatre Cambridge on this event. Tickets will be available from both the Cambridge Literary Festival and the Arts Theatre.
Venue: Arts Theatre Cambridge
Duration: 1 hour
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Author Biography
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; 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, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.
Chair Biography
Tom Gatti is Literary Editor for The Observer. He is the editor of Long Players: Writers on the Albums That Shaped Them, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Tom is a former editor of the New Statesman.
