Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith FRSL (born 25 October 1975) is a contemporary English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her first novel was called White Teeth. It immediately became a best-seller and won awards. Her most recent book is Feel Free (2018). It is a collection of essays. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010.
Early life
Smith was born Sadie Smith in Willesden in the north-west London borough of Brent. Her mother was Yvonne Bailey and her father was Harvey Smith. Bailey is Jamaican and Smith is English At the age of 14, she changed her name to Zadie.
Smith's mother grew up in Jamaica, and emigrated to England in 1969. Smith's parents divorced when she was a teenager. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers (one is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown, and the other is the rapper Luc Skyz). As a child, Smith liked tap dancing. As a teenager, she considered a career in musical theatre. When she was a university student, Smith earned money as a jazz singer. She also wanted to become a journalist. Despite earlier ambitions, literature became her main interest.
Education
Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School. She then studied English literature atKing's College, Cambridge. She did not leave Cambridge with a double First. She got a Third on her Part Ones.
The popular British comedy double act Mitchell and Webb may have rejected Smith from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1990s.
At Cambridge, Smith published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called The Mays Anthology. A publisher liked the stories and offered her a contract for her first novel. Smith contacted a literary agent, and A. P. Watt represented her. Smith returned to guest-edit the anthology in 2001.
Career
Smith's first novel White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, before it was completed. Publishers saw part of the manuscript and an auction for the rights started. Hamish Hamilton won. Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at Cambridge. It was published in 2000. The novel immediately became a best-seller. It was praised internationally and won awards, including: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. The novel was adapted for television in 2002. Smith was writer-in-residence at the ICA in London and later published, as editor, an anthology of sex writing, Piece of Flesh, as the main work of this job.
In interviews, Smith reported that all the attention around her first novel had caused her to suffer briefly from writer's block. But, her second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success. Critics did not like it as much as White Teeth.
After the publication of The Autograph Man, Smith visited the United States as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Smith's third novel, On Beauty, was published in September 2005. The story happens mostly in and around Greater Boston. It received better reviews than The Autograph Man: it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
Also in 2005, Smith published Martha and Hanwell. This book combines two short stories about two troubled characters. The stories had been published first in Granta and The New Yorker. Penguin published Martha and Hanwell with a new introduction by the author as part of their pocket series to celebrate their 70th birthday. The first story, "Martha, Martha", is about Smith's familiar themes of race and postcolonial identity. "Hanwell in Hell" is about a man in trouble trying to understand the death of his wife. In December 2008 she guest-edited the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
After teaching fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts, Smith joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction in 2010.
Smith's novel NW was published in 2012. The story happens in the Kilburn area of north-west London. So, the title comes from the local postcode, NW6. NW was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction. NW was made into a BBC television film directed by Saul Dibb and adapted by Rachel Bennette. Starring Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox, it was broadcast on BBC Two on 14 November 2016.
Smith's fifth novel, Swing Time, was published in November 2016. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2017.
Between March and October 2011, Smith was the monthly New Books reviewer for Harper's Magazine. She often writes for The New York Review of Books. In 2010, The Guardian newspaper asked Smith for her "10 rules for writing fiction".
Personal life
Smith met Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge. Smith dedicated On Beauty to "my dear Laird". She also uses his name in White Teeth: "An' all the good-lookin' men, all the rides like your man Nicky Laird, they're all dead."
The couple lived in Rome, Italy, from November 2006 to 2007. They now live in New York City and Queen's Park, London. They have two children, Katherine (Kit) and Harvey (Hal).
Bibliography
Novels
White Teeth (2000)
The Autograph Man (2002)
On Beauty (2005)
NW (2012)
Swing Time (2016)
The Fraud (2019)
Short fiction
Collections
"Martha and Hanwell" (2005)
"Grand Union" (2019)
Stories
Non-fiction
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009)
Stop What You're Doing and Read This! (2011) (with Carmen Callil, Mark Haddon, Michael Rosen and Jeanette Winterson)
"Some Notes on Attunement: A voyage around Joni Mitchell", The New Yorker, 17 December 2012, and later featured in The Best American Essays (2013)
"On optimism and despair", The New York Review of Books (22 December 2016); speech given on accepting the Welt-Literaturpreis
Fences: A Brexit Diary (2016)
Feel Free (2018)
As editor
Piece of Flesh (2001)
The Burned Children of America (2003) (with Dave Eggers)
The Book of Other People (2007)
Critical studies and reviews of Smith's work
Review of NW.
Tew, Philip (ed.). Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Walters, Tracey (ed.). Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. New York: Peter Lang Publications, 2008.
Awards and recognition
She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002. In a 2004 In a BBC poll, cultural researchers named Smith in the top twenty most influential people in British culture.
In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors, and was also included in the 2013 list. She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on 1 September 2010. Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction. and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2006 Her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
White Teeth: won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award. Included on Time magazine's 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005
The Autograph Man: won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize
On Beauty: won the Commonwealth Writers' Best Book Award (Eurasia Section), and the Orange Prize for Fiction; shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
NW: shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction
Swing Time: longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017
Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, 2003 and 2013
2016 Welt-Literaturpreis
2017 Langston Hughes Medal awarded on 16 November at the Langston Hughes Festival at The City College of New York.
2019 Infinity Award, Critical Writing and Research, International Center of Photography
References
Other websites
Curry, Ginette. Toubab La!: Literary Representations of Mixed-race Characters in the African Diaspora. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, .
"Girl Wonder" on Salon.com (2000).
Joy Press, "Only Connect" , an interview with Zadie Smith in the Village Voice, 13 September 2005.
Stephanie Merritt, "She's young, black, British - and the first publishing sensation of the millennium", The Observer, 16 January 2000.
Wyatt Mason, "White Knees", an essay on Smith's body of work, Harper's Magazine, October 2005.
Smith article archive from The New York Review of Books
"Mind the Gap" in Guernica Magazine, January 2012.
Broadcaster Philippa Thomas on the London of Zadie Smith's NW, London Fictions, 2012.
Alison Flood, "Zadie Smith criticises author who says more than one child limits career", The Guardian, 13 June 2013
Zadie Smith on Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 22 September 2013.
Brian Tanguay, "A Conversation with Zadie Smith", Santa Barbara Independent, 21 November 2017.
1975 births
Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
Living people
English writers