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Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Born 25 October 1975(1975-10-25)
Brent, London, England
Occupation Novelist, essayist
Nationality English
Writing period 2000-present
Literary movement realism, postmodernism

Zadie Smith (born 25 October 1975)[1] is an English novelist. To date she has written three novels. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent – a largely working-class area – to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne McLean, and an English father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and immigrated to England in 1969. Their marriage was her father's second. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper Doc Brown. As a child she was fond of tap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actress in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist.

Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. When she was 14, she changed her name to "Zadie." Despite other earlier ammbitions, literature, however, emerged as her principal interest and and would provide a model for her future career.

[edit] Education and career

Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature.[2] In an interview with the Guardian in 2000, Smith was keen to correct a recent newspaper assertion that she left Cambridge with a double First. "Actually, I got a Third in my Part Ones", she said. At Cambridge she published a number of short stories in a collection of student writing (see Short stories) called the May Anthologies. These 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 the Wylie Agency on the basis of little more than a first chapter.

Zadie Smith seems to have been rejected for a place in the Cambridge Footlights by the popular British comedy double act Mitchell and Webb, whilst all three were studying at Cambridge University in the 90's.[3]

White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, long before it was completed. On the basis of a partial manuscript an auction among different publishers for the rights started, with Hamish Hamilton being successful. Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel became a bestseller immediately. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards (see Novels). The novel was adapted for television in 2002 by Channel 4. She also 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.

In interviews she reported that the hype surrounding her first novel had caused her to suffer a short spell of writer's block. Nevertheless, her second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although the critical response was not as close to unanimously positive as it had been to White Teeth.

After the publication of The Autograph Man, Smith visited the United States as a 2002–2003 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University.[4] She started work on a still unreleased book of essays, The Morality of the Novel, aka 'Fail Better', in which she considers a selection of 20th century writers through the lens of moral philosophy.

The second novel was followed by another ,"On Beauty," published in September 2005 and which is set largely in and around Greater Bostonwhich attracted more acclaim. This third novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.

In December 2008 she guest edited the BBC Radio 4 Today programme [5].

While currently teaching fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts, she will be joining New York University as a tenured professor of fiction as of September 1, 2010.

[edit] Private life

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." The couple lived in Monti, Rome, Italy from November 2006–2007 and are now based between New York City (where both Smith and Laird are teaching creative writing at Columbia University) and Kilburn, London.

[edit] Works

[edit] Short stories

[edit] Novels

[edit] Edited Collections

[edit] Non-Fiction

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1560999,00.html "Learning Curve," The Guardian, 3 September 2005
  2. ^ Zadie Smith, Granta
  3. ^ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/22/081222fa_fact_smith
  4. ^ 2002-2003 Radcliffe Institute Fellows
  5. ^ [1]

[edit] References

  • Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2009.
  • Walters, Tracey (Ed.). Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. New York: Peter Lang Publications, 2008.

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Zadie Smith
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