Zadie Smith to give lecture on Sally Rooney for Abbey Theatre's T.S. Eliot Lecture 2026

Zadie Smith will present the eleventh T.S. Eliot Lecture, titled Radical Intimacy: On Sally Rooney, on December 6. The lecture series takes place at the Abbey Theatre.

The Abbey Theatre's Artistic Director Caitríona McLaughlin will induct the evening. Marty Rea, a stage and screen actor from Belfast, will then read Eliot's Preludes. 

Zadie Smith will deliver the lecture, followed by a conversation between her and Canadian novelist Sheila Heti.

Smith is the author of several novels, including White Teeth, On Beauty and NW. Her debut novel White Teeth won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Betty Trask Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Smith taught fiction at Columbia University and has been a tenured professor at New York University since 2010.

Irish author Sally Rooney is best known for her internationally best-selling novels Normal People, Conversations with Friends and Intermezzo. She has received several awards for her works, including Novel of the Year for Normal People at the Irish Book Awards in 2018.

T.S. Eliot was the author of 'The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock' and 'The Waste Land'. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. The lecture series commemorates his profound impact on modernist literature.

Tickets to the lecture are available here.

 

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