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journalism, and unpublished short stories and poems.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 Radio 4’s Open Book, January
2012
POEMS
I wrote novels for 10 years, which is long
enough. Now I just do poetry.
“Night Wind” (Feb 1); “Moon Madness” (Sept 10);
“The Lizard” (Sept 2); “Song in Summer” (July 19); “Iraq” (May 26); “An English
Spinster, 1928” (May 5); “My Daddy can Whistle” (Mar 13); “My Terror of
Todmorden” (Feb 27); “Uncle Sidney Tucks You In” (Jan 6); “Pain Considered”
(Dec 7); “Burscough” (Nov 21); “Life” (Nov 18); “I See A Gourmet” (Nov 5); “To
My Father” (Oct 25); “New Windows” (Sept 15); “My Wife Is Beautiful” (August
3); etc.
“Brief” (Mar 9); “On a Birthday”; “Sex Change
at the London Hospital” (Jan 17); “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”
(April 21)
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)
“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 also write the “Historic Homes” feature for its
Friday property section. These days the paper is hidden behind a paywall, but
here’s some earlier stuff: