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Zadie Smith first met Nick Laird when she submitted a short story to a collection he was editing. They were both undergraduates at the University of Cambridge. Her story, Laird told The Telegraph in an interview in July 2005, "...was just head-and-shoulders above anything else." Smith's career took off after that. Her first novel, White Teeth, was an international bestseller and won critical acclaim. Later, Laird said that going to literary parties with Smith made him feel "two feet tall." Even so, the two writers support each other – showing each other their unpublished work and exchanging advice.

Smith has also publicly described their relationship. In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, she explains that she and Laird work in the same library in New York — on different floors. At the end of the day, they tell each other about the people they have seen out and about, and re-enact the conversations they have overheard (at one point she says she couldn't wait to tell her husband about a cat-eyed teenager in a Pocahontas wig she saw "sashaying" down Broadway). "The advice one finds in ladies' magazines is usually to be feared," she writes. "But there is something in that old chestnut: 'shared interests.'"

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