Zadie Smith, originally Sadie, was born October 27, 1975 in London, England. Smith is a British author known for her treatment of race, religion, and cultural identity and for her novels’ eccentric characters, savvy humour, and snappy dialogue. She became a sensation in the literary world with the publication of her first novel, White Teeth, in 2000.
Smith, the daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father, changed the spelling of her first name to Zadie at age 14. She began writing poems and stories as a child and later studied English literature at the University of Cambridge (B.A., 1998). While there she began writing White Teeth, and at age 21 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 chronicles 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. Spanning some 50 years, the novel also details the trials and tribulations of their families, which prompted some critics to hail Smith as a modern-day Charles Dickens. The ambitious work won numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award (2000), and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002. It centres on Alex-Li Tandem, a Chinese Jewish autograph trader who sets out to meet a reclusive 1950s starlet and in the process undertakes his own journey of self-discovery. The Autograph Man, which also addresses the public’s obsession with celebrity and pop culture, received mostly positive reviews. Soon after the novel’s publication, Smith became a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Continue reading from Encyclopedia Britannica
Zadie Smith (British Literature Council)
Zadie Smith: ‘I Have a Very Messy and Chaotic Mind’ (The Guardian)
The Pieces of Zadie Smith (The New York Times Style Magazine)
On Killing Charles Dickens, by Zadie Smith (The New Yorker)
An Interview with Zadie Smith and Toyin Ojih Odutola by Katy Hessel (National Portrait Gallery)
Zadie Smith on Discovering the Secret History of Black England (The Guardian)
