Past Recipients of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement

2024

Zadie Smith Receives the 2024 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement

On November 8th, 2024 Zadie Smith received The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. In her speech she connected the recent presidential election with Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” first published in The Kenyon Review in 1953:

“Thank you. I’ve been told I have about ten minutes. For some reason it seems to be my destiny to accept literary awards at times of world historical disaster. If I was superstitious, I might conclude it was God’s way of teasing me, though Lord knows I need no reminders of the relative insignificance of my work. But here I am again, accepting a literary prize, feeling somewhat alienated from myself, experiencing myself as a posthumous entity. Zadie Smith: she of all those novels, all those essays. Thank you for celebrating her this evening – if she were here, I know she would be very grateful. And now, for the rest of the nine minutes, I would like to speak about somebody else: Flannery O’ Connor . . .”

Please click the following links to read the speech in full, or to read Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

Read Zadie Smith’s Acceptance Speech

Read O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”

About Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time and The Fraud; 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. She has won literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Letters and has twice been listed as one of Granta’s ’20 Best Young British Novelists’. She writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She was born in north-west London, where she still lives.

The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement gala is a fundraising event that provides scholarship funds for writers to attend Kenyon Review workshops. Over 800 participants attend our residential and online generative workshops each year and nearly one fifth of those writers receive scholarship assistance. Please watch the following promotional video to learn more about workshops at The Kenyon Review:

Read Zadie Smith’s Acceptance Speech

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