Cover

About the Author

Zadie Smith is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of seven volumes of fiction and three essay collections. Since 2010 she has been a professor of creative writing at New York University. She is a member of both the American Academy of Letters and the Royal Society of Literature. The Wife of Willesden is her first work for the stage.

By the same author

FICTION

White Teeth

The Autograph Man

On Beauty

NW

The Embassy of Cambodia

Swing Time

Grand Union

NON-FICTION

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Feel Free

Intimations: Six Essays

Dedication

Dedicated to the Windrush generation, with much love and respect

Presented by Kiln Theatre

in association with

Brent 2020, London Borough of Culture

Introduction

From Chaucerian to North Weezian (via Twitter)

This is a weird one: sometime in early 2018, I got an email from one Lois Stonock, informing me that ‘we’ had won the bid to be London’s Borough of Culture 2020. I’m ashamed to admit it took me a minute to work out who this ‘we’ was and how I was included in it. Then I remembered: a year earlier I’d agreed to add my name to Brent’s bid although to be honest I had only the vaguest sense at the time of what I had said yes to, or what I would do if, out of the thirty-two boroughs of London, my beloved Brent somehow beat the statistical odds and won.