Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist and short story writer. She is best known for White Teeth (2000), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Betty Trask Award. Her later works include On Beauty (2005), which won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and The Fraud (2023), a historical novel.

Born Sadie Smith on 25 October 1975 in Willesden, London, she changed her name to Zadie at 14. Her mother, Yvonne Bailey, was Jamaican and emigrated to England in 1969. Her father, Harvey Smith, was English and thirty years her mother's senior. She was educated at Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School before studying English Literature at King's College, Cambridge.

At university, she considered a career in journalism and worked as a jazz singer. She also submitted short stories to The Mays Anthology, which attracted the attention of a publisher. "Actuall,y I got a Third in my Part Ones," she later told The Guardian, correcting a claim that she had got a double First. She graduated with an upper second-class honours degree.

Smith's debut novel, White Teeth, was submitted to publishers before it was finished. An auction was held for the rights, which were won by Hamish Hamilton. The novel, completed during her final year at Cambridge, became a bestseller when it was published in 2000. It was made into a television series in 2002.

In 2003, she was included in Granta's list of the 20 best young writers. Smith responded to the literary critic James Wood's classification of her style as "hysterical realism" by stating that fiction should use both head and heart.

Her second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), was commercially successful but received mixed reviews. On Beauty, set partly in the Boston area, was published in 2005. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Smith became a tenured professor of fiction at New York University. Her fourth novel, NW (2012), set in Kilburn, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and was made into a BBC film in 2016.

Smith's fifth novel, Swing Time (2016), was inspired by her early love of tap dancing. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2019, she published her first collection of short stories, Grand Union. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she published Intimations (2020), a collection of essays. In 2021, she debuted her first play, The Wife of Willesden, a retelling of Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale".

The Fraud (2023) was her first historical novel, exploring the Tichborne case and themes of identity and deception. The same year, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Zadie Smith divides her time between London and New York with her husband, the writer Nick Laird, and their two children.

Photo credit: zadiesmith.com