Zadie Smith receives The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award 2026

When the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award is bestowed for the tenth time on 4 October 2026, the recipient will be the internationally renowned author Zadie Smith. The prestigious prize will be awarded in a grand ceremony at Odeon in Odense and will once again be celebrated nationally and internationally.

When the British author Zadie Smith comes to Denmark in October 2026, she will be presented with The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award and will receive 500,000 Danish kroner together with a sculpture, The Ugly Duckling, created by the sculptor Stine Ring Hansen. The award is presented on the basis of the following citation:

“Zadie Smith is awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award 2026 for her ability to portray the outsider with both a distanced perspective and a life-affirming empathy. This is achieved in a series of formally experimental novels which share a global outlook and a special ability to pin down in language the spirit of the age.”

Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in Willesden, north-west London, to a Jamaican-English family. As a 25-year-old she made her debut with the novel White Teeth (2000), which became an international bestseller and secured her the first of her career’s many literary prizes. The novel is set in a multicultural area of London from the mid‑1970s onwards and explores the friendship between two former Second World War soldiers, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, and the lives of their families. The novel portrays a society shaped by people of diverse ethnic backgrounds and religious and family affiliations and does so with a bold sense of humour and imagination that challenges prejudice and conventional ways of thinking.

Since then, Zadie Smith has strengthened her position as one of the most notable writers of our time. She is especially recognised for her dynamic language and empathetic ability to portray the multicultural reality in which increasing numbers of people have lived since the 1990s, especially in big cities. Zadie Smith is able to capture moods and situations with a distinctive tone that gives the reader a sense of the recent past – the 70s, 80s, and 90s – that she often writes about. She invites us to laugh, to wonder, and to look critically at ourselves.

Since her sensational debut she has written five critically acclaimed novels: The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2007), NW (2012), Swing Time (2016) and The Fraud (2023). In addition, she has published short stories and essays and has worked in drama.

Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is set in the nineteenth century and is based on the real events surrounding a court case in which a man claimed to be the missing heir to a baronetcy and a large fortune. But he may be a fraudster – and fraud is a pervasive feature of the Victorian era, in which imperialism triumphs while slavery leaves a lasting impact on culture and society.

The previous recipients of The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, whose company Smith now joins, are Margaret Atwood, Karl Ove Knausgård, J.K. Rowling, Haruki Murakami, Isabel Allende, Paulo Coelho, A.S. Byatt and Sir Salman Rushdie.

The full programme for the visit will be published in the course of 2026.

Read more about the prize and the earlier recipients at www.andersen-award.com.

With kind regards,

Jens Olesen, Chairman of the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award Committee

For further information, please contact:

Stine Albrechtsen · stine@have.dk · 3024 1400

Amalie Søndergaard · amalie@have.dk · 2858 8150