Zadie Smith wrote a magnificent talk for the occasion of her receipt of the 2016 Welt Literature Prize in Berlin two days after the election of Donnie from Queens. The NYRB shares it.

She is often asked these days about an apparent move in her fiction from optimism to pessimism.

Sometimes it is put far more explicitly, like so: “You were such a champion of ‘multiculturalism.’ Can you admit now that it has failed?” When I hear these questions I am reminded that to have grown up in a homogeneous culture in a corner of rural England, say, or France, or Poland, during the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, is to think of oneself as having been simply alive in