Zadie Smith

Smith was born in Willesden in the north-west London borough of Brent to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith,[5] who was 30 years his wife's senior.[6] At the age of 14, she changed her name from Sadie to Zadie.[7]

Smith's mother grew up in Jamaica and emigrated to England in 1969.[2] 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 was fond of tap dancing,[2] and in her teenage years, she considered a career in musical theatre. While at university, Smith earned money as a jazz singer, and wanted to become a journalist. Despite earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest.

Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge, where she studied English literature. In an interview with The Guardian in 2000, Smith corrected a newspaper assertion that she left Cambridge with a double First. "Actually, I got a Third in my Part Ones", she said.[8] She graduated with upper second-class honours.[9]

Smith seems to have been rejected for a place in the Cambridge Footlights by the popular British comedy double act Mitchell and Webb, while all three were studying at Cambridge University in the 1990s.[10]

At Cambridge, Smith published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called The Mays Anthology. They attracted the attention of a publisher, who offered her a contract for her first novel. Smith decided to contact a literary agent and was taken on by A. P. Watt.[11] Smith returned to guest-edit the anthology in 2001.[12]

Smith's début novel White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997 before it was completed. On the basis of a partial manuscript, an auction for the rights was begun, which was won by Hamish Hamilton. Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at the University of Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel immediately became a best-seller and received much acclaim. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. The novel was adapted for television in 2002.[2] In July 2000, Smith's debut was also the subject for discussion in a controversial essay of literary criticism by James Wood entitled "Human, All Too Inhuman", where Wood critiques the novel as part of a contemporary genre of hysterical realism where "‘[i]nformation has become the new character" and human feeling is absent from contemporary fiction.[13] In an article for The Guardian in October 2001, Smith responded to the criticism by agreeing with the accuracy of the term and that she agreed with Wood's underlying argument that "any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped".[14] However, she rejected her debut being categorised alongside major authors such as David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, and Don DeLillo and the dismissal of their own innovations on the basis of being hysterical realism.[14] Responding earnestly to Wood's concerns about contemporary literature and culture, Smith describes her own anxieities as a writer and argued that fiction should be "not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both".[14]

Smith served as writer-in-residence at the ICA in London and subsequently published, as editor, an anthology of sex writing, Piece of Flesh, as the culmination of this role.

Smith's second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although it was not as well received by critics 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.[15] She started work on a still-unreleased book of essays, The Morality of the Novel (a.k.a. Fail Better), in which she considers a selection of 20th-century writers through the lens of moral philosophy. Some portions of this book presumably appear in the essay collection Changing My Mind, published in November 2009.[16]

Smith's third novel, On Beauty, was published in September 2005. It is set largely in and around Greater Boston. It attracted more acclaim than The Autograph Man: it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize,[17] and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.[18]

Later in the same year, Smith published Martha and Hanwell, a book that pairs two short stories about two troubled characters, originally published in Granta and The New Yorker respectively. Penguin published Martha and Hanwell with a new introduction by the author as part of their pocket series to celebrate their 70th birthday.[19] The first story, "Martha, Martha", deals with Smith's familiar themes of race and postcolonial identity, while "Hanwell in Hell" is about a man struggling to cope with the death of his wife.[20] In December 2008 she guest-edited the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.[21]

After teaching fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts, Smith joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction in 2010.[22]

Smith's novel NW was published in 2012. It is set in the Kilburn area of north-west London, the title being a reference to the local postcode, NW6. NW was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction.[23] NW was made into a BBC television film directed by Saul Dibb and adapted by Rachel Bennette.[24] Starring Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox,[25] it was broadcast on BBC Two on 14 November 2016.[26][27]

In 2015 it was announced that Smith, along with her husband Nick Laird, was writing the screenplay for a science fiction movie to be directed by French filmmaker Claire Denis.[28] Smith later said that her involvement had been overstated and that she had simply helped to polish the English dialogue for the film.[29]

Smith's fifth novel, Swing Time, was published in November 2016. It drew inspiration from Smith's childhood love of tap dancing.[30] 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.[31][32] She is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.[33] In 2010, The Guardian newspaper asked Smith for her "10 rules for writing fiction". Among them she declared: "Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied."[34]

Smith's first collection of short stories, Grand Union, was published on 8 October 2019. In 2020 she published six essays in a collection entitled Intimations, the royalties from which she said she would be donating to the Equal Justice Initiative and New York’s COVID-19 emergency relief fund.[35]

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 passing in White Teeth: "An' all the good-lookin' men, all the rides like your man Nicky Laird, they're all dead."[36]

The couple lived in Rome, Italy, from November 2006 to 2007, and lived in New York City and Queen's Park, London[37] for about 10 years before relocating to Kilburn, London in 2020. They have two children, Katherine (Kit) and Harvey (Hal).[38]

Smith describes herself as "unreligious",[39] and was not raised in a religion, although retains a "curiosity" about the role religion plays in others' lives.[40] In an essay exploring humanist and existentialist views of death and dying, Smith characterises her worldview as that of a "sentimental humanist".[41][42]

She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002. In a 2004 BBC poll of cultural researchers, Smith was named among the top twenty most influential people in British culture.[46][47]

In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors,[48] and was also included in the 2013 list.[49] She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on 1 September 2010.[50] Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction[51] and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2006[18] and 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[52]
• Granta′s Best of Young British Novelists, 2003 and 2013
• 2016: Welt-Literaturpreis[53]
• 2017: Langston Hughes Medal[54][55] awarded on 16 November at the Langston Hughes Festival at The City College of New York.[56]
• 2019: Infinity Award, Critical Writing and Research, International Center of Photography
• 2018: National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Feel Free[57]
• 2020: Grand Union named a finalist for The Story Prize[58]

• Stewart, Alison. Interview with Zadie Smith about her work "Grand Union" interview and discussion broadcast on WNYC Public Radio show "All Of It" with Alison Stewart on October 26th 2020 (recorded in 2019) https://www.wnyc.org/story/zadie-smiths-grand-union

• Curry, Ginette. Toubab La!: Literary Representations of Mixed-race Characters in the African Diaspora. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-1847182319.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Zadie Smith.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Zadie Smith

• "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.