“I don’t know when I read men any more”, the writer Zadie Smith told a literary festival audience on Sunday.

“It does happen sometimes, but it’s completely flipped compared to the reading I did when I was young,” she continued.

Smith – the author of novels including White Teeth and On Beauty – was speaking at the Arts theatre, Cambridge, about her latest book, the essay collection Dead and Alive, in which she discusses a number of female artists, among other subjects.

Asked whether the author was referring to the “much-discussed ‘death of the male novelist’” by host and Observer literary editor Tom Gatti, Smith said: “No, I have read some really good ones recently, actually by millennial men, really fascinating, balls-to-the-wall novels – I think they’ve got nothing to lose so they’re like, ‘let’s do this’.” Last year, Smith also listed Flesh by David Szalay among her holiday reading recommendations for the Guardian, ahead of it winning the Booker.

Smith said she was “almost embarrassed to say” that she mainly reads women now. “Being a woman and getting older, you become enormously impatient with anything other than other older women,” she added. “All I read now is Helen Garner because I want wisdom.”

Asked about the female artists she writes about in Dead and Alive – including Joan Didion, Kara Walker and Celia Paul – Smith said: “I was born in 1975, and what’s happened since then in women’s art is so cheering and so extraordinary, that I just wanted to log it.” She remembers sitting in her room as a teenager, trying to think of female writers who “hadn’t been dead 250 years”, and “it was hard”. There was AS Byatt, Margaret Drabble, and Toni Morrison – “of course there were so many women writing, but they didn’t write in a way that I would have noticed aged 12, 13.”

The author did mention a number of men when giving recommendations of other essayists – John Berger, Stuart Hall and James Baldwin – along with Joan Didion, Anne Enright and Susan Sontag.

Smith also made a number of comments on the political landscape. “We’re seeing politics done by sociopaths right now,” she said.

At a later point, she said that “what we call the Labour party has not been the Labour party since Kinnock. That’s a long line of disappointment.”

Asked whether Britain is more or less inclusive now than it was when she was growing up in London, she responded: “for me, that’s a purely economic question, and if people are going to be as poor as they’re being made right now, then no, it’s far less inclusive.”

The writer said she is now working on a new novel about teenagers in the 90s. Her editor recently told her that the book is “going to shock people because of all the things that [were] possible”, compared with the opportunities that young people have today. “This is a disappeared world.”