The Old Schools, Trinity Lane, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom
In 1998, Zadie Smith received a Bachelor of Arts from Cambridge University.
Career
Gallery of Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
Gallery of Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith
Gallery of Zadie Smith
Strand, Holborn, London WC2A 2LL, United Kingdom
Zadie Smith during The Orange Prize for Fiction 2006 - June 6, 2006 at The Royal Courts of Justice in London, Great Britain.
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485 5th Ave, New York, NY 10017, United States
Zadie Smith attends the 2011 New Yorker Festival Party Hosted By David Remnick at Andaz 5th Avenue on October 1, 2011 in New York City.
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Strand, Holborn, London WC2A 2LL, United Kingdom
Zadie Smith during The Orange Prize for Fiction 2006 - June 6, 2006 at The Royal Courts of Justice in London, Great Britain.
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429 11th Ave, New York, NY 10001, United States
Author Zadie Smith speaks on stage during the 2012 Book Expo America: Adult Book & Author Breakfast at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on June 7, 2012 in New York City
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242 W 41st St, New York, NY 10036, United States
Zadie Smith attends PUMA Impact Awards at Times Center on November 13, 2013 in New York City.
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Zadie Smith
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848 Washington St, New York, NY 10014, United States
Novelist Zadie Smith attends the 2015 New Yorker Festival Wrap Party hosted by David Remnick at the top of the Standard Hotel, 848 Washington Street, on October 3, 2015 in New York City.
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Writer Zadie Smith attends The 2016 Glam Rock Moth Ball on May 10, 2016 in New York, New York.
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476 5th Ave, New York, NY 10018, United States
Novelist Zadie Smith attends the 2016 Library Lions gala at New York Public Library - Stephen A Schwartzman Building on November 7, 2016 in New York City.
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57 Hudson River Greenway, New York, NY 10011, United States
Writer Zadie Smith attends the Fifth Annual Girls Write Now Awards at City Winery on May 23, 2017, in New York City.
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Zadie Smith
Gallery of Zadie Smith
476 5th Ave, New York, NY 10018, United States
Zadie Smith attends the New York Public Library 2017 Library Lions Gala at the New York Public Library at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on November 6, 2017 in New York City.
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Zadie Smith
Gallery of Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Gallery of Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Gallery of Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith speaks on stage at the 2018 New Yorker Festival - Zadie Smith In Conversation With The New Yorker's David Remnick on October 6, 2018 in New York City.
Gallery of Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Gallery of Zadie Smith
20 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023, United States
Zadie Smith attends 2019 Ailey Spirit Gala at David Koch Theatre at Lincoln Center on June 13, 2019 in New York City.
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Orange Prize for Fiction
Strand, Holborn, London WC2A 2LL, United Kingdom
Zadie Smith during The Orange Prize for Fiction 2006 - June 6, 2006 at The Royal Courts of Justice in London, Great Britain.
Welt-Literaturpreis
Mehringdamm 33, 10961 Berlin, Germany
English novelist Zadie Smith at Redaktion BLAU on November 10, 2016 in Berlin, Germany.
Zadie Smith (L) and Nick Laird attend The Serpentine Gallery Summer Party co-hosted by Brioni at The Serpentine Gallery on July 1, 2014 in London, England.
Authors Michael Chabon (L) and Zadie Smith (R) attend "Fiction Night with Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith" during the 2010 New Yorker Festival at Acura at SIR Stage37 on October 1, 2010 in New York City.
(L-R) Actor Ethan Hawke, Malcolm Gladwell, Zadie Smith and Paul LeClerc attend the 2010 Library Lions Benefit at The New York Public Library on November 1, 2010 in New York City.
Author Zadie Smith speaks on stage during the 2012 Book Expo America: Adult Book & Author Breakfast at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on June 7, 2012 in New York City
(L to R) Graham Norton, Zadie Smith and Nick Laird attend The Serpentine Gallery summer party at The Serpentine Gallery on July 2, 2015 in London, England.
848 Washington St, New York, NY 10014, United States
Novelist Zadie Smith attends the 2015 New Yorker Festival Wrap Party hosted by David Remnick at the top of the Standard Hotel, 848 Washington Street, on October 3, 2015 in New York City.
Author Zadie Smith (L) and 2015 Literature Innovator Karl Ove Knausgardi attend the 2015 WSJ. Magazine Innovator Awards at the Museum of Modern Art on November 4, 2015 in New York City.
Novelist Zadie Smith attends the 2016 Library Lions gala at New York Public Library - Stephen A Schwartzman Building on November 7, 2016 in New York City.
(L-R) guest, guest, Zadie Smith, guest and guest attend ACCOMPANIED LITERARY SOCIETY hosts THE OSCARS viewing party and benefit for ALS BOOK-TO-FILM GRANT at Hudson Hotel Library on February 22, 2009 in New York City.
(L-R) Colum McCann, Vanessa Manko and Zadie Smith attend SALMAN RUSHDIE Launch Party for "Luka and the Fire of Life" at The Bowery Hotel on November 15, 2010 in New York City.
Zadie Smith attends the New York Public Library 2017 Library Lions Gala at the New York Public Library at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on November 6, 2017 in New York City.
111 N 12th St 22nd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11249, United States
Zadie Smith and Toure attend TBS hosts the after party for "The Last O.G." at Westlight in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, United States on March 29, 2018 in New York City.
Zadie Smith speaks on stage at the 2018 New Yorker Festival - Zadie Smith In Conversation With The New Yorker's David Remnick on October 6, 2018 in New York City.
(White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern l...)
White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.
(The Autograph Man is a deeply funny existential tour arou...)
The Autograph Man is a deeply funny existential tour around the hollow trappings of modernity: celebrity, cinema, and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience. It offers further proof that Zadie Smith is one of the most staggeringly talented writers of her generation. Look for her new book Swing Time, coming November 2016.
(On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in...)
On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars - on both sides of the Atlantic - serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.
(The Book of Other People is about character. Twenty-five ...)
The Book of Other People is about character. Twenty-five or so outstanding writers have been asked by Zadie Smith to make up a fictional character. By any measure, creating character is at the heart of the fictional enterprise, and this book concentrates on writers who share a talent for making something recognizably human out of words (and, in the case of the graphic novelists, pictures). But the purpose of the book is variety: straight "realism"-if such a thing exists-is not the point. There are as many ways to create character as there are writers, and this anthology features a rich assortment of exceptional examples.
(Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Trac...)
Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.
(Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in c...)
Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive - and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.
(Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beauti...)
Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the acclaimed writer Zadie Smith, and an expansive conversation with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa.
(Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection a...)
Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.
Smith began writing poems and stories as a child. At age 21, she began writing White Teeth, and she submitted some 80 pages to an agent. A frenzied bidding war ensued, and the book eventually was sold to Hamish Hamilton. Smith took several more years to complete the novel, and in 2000 it was published to rave reviews. Set in the working-class suburb of Willesden in northwest London, White Teeth chronicled the lives of best friends Archie Jones, a down-on-his-luck Englishman whose failed suicide attempt opens the novel, and Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim who struggles to fit into British society.
Smith served as writer-in-residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Her tenure there resulted in the publication of an anthology of erotic stories entitled Piece of Flesh (2001). 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. She also wrote the introduction for The Burned Children of America (2003), a collection of eighteen short stories by a new generation of young American writers.
On Beauty, published in 2005, further established Smith as one of the foremost British novelists of her day. The novel, heavily modeled on E.M. Forster’s Howards End, chronicled the lives of two families in the fictional town of Wellington, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. A comic work studying the culture wars and racial and ethnic overlap in a liberal college town, On Beauty was praised for its acumen and scathing satire. In December 2008 Zadie guest-edited the BBC Radio 4 Today programme and, then, after teaching fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts, Smith joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction in 2010. Between March and October 2011, Smith was the monthly New Books reviewer for Harper's Magazine. She is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
In 2012 appeared her work NW that centers on two women whose friendship - tempered by their straitened upbringings in a gritty London council estate - is tested by their divergent paths in adulthood. Though lauded for its evocative sense of place and sharply observed characters, the novel was deemed plotless and confusing by some critics. In her fifth novel, Swing Time (2016), Smith continued to explore issues of class and race while chronicling two childhood friends who both aspire to be dancers but whose lives take dramatically different turns.
Smith also edited and contributed to the short-story collection The Book of Other People (2007) and published the essay collections Changing My Mind (2009) and Feel Free (2018). Grand Union, a volume of her short stories, was published in 2019.
Smith considers herself as "unreligious". Although she was not raised in a religion, she is curios about the role religion plays in others' lives.
Views
Quotations:
"Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied."
Connections
In 2004, Smith married Nick Laird. They have two children, Katherine Kit and Harvey Hal.