educator essayist novelist writer
Ethnicity:
Zadie was born to English father and a Jamaican mother.
Sadie Smith was born on October 27, 1975, in London, England, to Yvonne Bailey, and Harvey Smith. At the age of 14, she changed her name to "Zadie".
In 1998, Zadie Smith received a Bachelor of Arts from Cambridge University.
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.
British novelist Zadie Smith burst into the international fiction scene with the publication of her debut novel White Teeth in 2000 and was immediately hailed as a new voice in British literature. The book won a number of awards and prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). It also won two EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards) for Best Book/Novel and Best Female Media Newcomer, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Author's Club First Novel Award. White Teeth has been translated into over twenty languages and was adapted for Channel 4 television in 2002.
Zadie Smith's second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), a story of loss, obsession and the nature of celebrity, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Her third novel, On Beauty, was published in 2005, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.
(On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in...)
2005(Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection a...)
2019(Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beauti...)
2018(The Autograph Man is a deeply funny existential tour arou...)
2003Smith considers herself as "unreligious". Although she was not raised in a religion, she is curios about the role religion plays in others' lives.
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."
In 2004, Smith married Nick Laird. They have two children, Katherine Kit and Harvey Hal.
