The website of
“one of Britain’s most challenging
and original novelists” Times Literary
Supplement
With extracts from the novels (although the
text of China Dreams is complete), journalism,
and unpublished short stories and poems.
You can write to me via sidsmith6 [at] gmail [dot] com
The Wikipedia entry
On BBC Radio 4’s Open Book: January, 2012 On writing
novels about a place you haven’t been (from about 8mins in)
October, 2012 “Writing
novels is boring – poetry is best” (from 16mins 40sec in)
POEMS
“Revisiting” added
April 27; “Home after Christmas”; “Night Wind”; “Moon Madness”; “The
Lizard”; “Song in Summer”; “Iraq”; “An English Spinster, 1928”; “My Daddy can
Whistle”; “My Terror of Todmorden”; “Uncle Sidney Tucks You In”; “Pain
Considered”; “Burscough”; “Life”; “I See A Gourmet”; “To My Father”; “New
Windows”; “My Wife Is Beautiful”; etc.
“Brief” updated May 12;
“On a Birthday”; “Sex Change at the London Hospital”; “A Very Hippy Christmas”
War, pianos and strange sex with mirrors.
Why We’re Not
Bloody Moving to Bloody France
or: “In the Chunnel, Arguing with the Missus”
ON PATRICK
O’BRIAN’S MASTER AND COMMANDER SERIES updated
May 13
Random notes about novels
I adore:
“Is Stephen the best character in all literature? He’s the best I know.
Is his friendship with Jack Aubrey the best in all literature? It’s the best I know.”
NOVELS
From ‘Something Like a
House’ (Picador, 2001)
Whitbread First Novel
Award, James Tait Black Memorial Prize
“This amazing, authoritative tale of a deserter
in China – ‘the only round-eye in the Red Guards’ – stains the mind indelibly,
like a beautiful, harrowing dream”: Books
of the Year, Daily Telegraph
From ‘A House by the River’
(Picador, 2003)
“A poetic novel and a serious literary novel,
but also an adventure story. The writing is wonderful, absolutely brilliant.
There is no Whitbread Second Novel Award, but he would be up for it”: Tom Sutcliffe,
The full text of ‘China Dreams’
(Picador, 2007)
Introduction
to ebook version of China Dreams
“Plot summary cannot capture the strange beauty
of this spare and intricately constructed novel”: The Guardian
“A string of visions that could be taken from
Chinese folklore, but have as many resonances with the Bacchae, or the cult of Cybele.
These nightmares have all the authority of world myth … Smith has made
something fierce, alternative and horribly real”: Daily Telegraph
STORIES ABOUT
MIRRORS
JOURNALISM
I’m a sub-editor at The Times and write the occasional piece for the paper. These days
it’s behind a paywall, but if you have access you can search for my by-line, or
here are some direct routes: My
Japanese Wedding, a Historic Homes piece,
another
one, and a shortie about JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man.