This event is at capacity. 

If you have a ticket you can no longer use, please contact the Chan Centre Box Office with your order number to release the tickets, so someone else can attend.

The Chan Centre Box Office
Hours: 12–4pm Tue–Fri
Email: chan.tickets@ubc.ca
Phone: (604) 822-2697

Click here for the Chan Centre ticketing page.

If you don’t have a ticket: There will be a standby line at the venue set up two hours prior to the event, where empty seats will be assigned on a first-come, first-serve basis, at showtime, according to availability.

Presented in partnership with UBC School of Creative Writing and the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.

Zadie Smith, widely recognized as one of the finest and most influential authors writing in English today, joins the Vancouver Writers Fest for an evening of unforgettable storytelling. This event is a celebration not only of Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, but also of you: our treasured community. Smith will speak with her internationally-renowned Canadian contemporary, Madeleine Thien, author of the multi-award-winning novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing. 

Though we consider all of our Special Events exceptional, this one is truly momentous for us: we are making this event free to all, as a gift to the local community that has supported us so generously and steadfastly through these turbulent pandemic years.

Books will be for sale at the event courtesy of Book Warehouse, a division of Black Bond Books.

Event Participants:

Zadie Smith

ZADIE SMITH is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.

Madeleine Thien

MADELEINE THIEN is the author of four books, most recently Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won the Giller Prize and Governor General's Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.