Early life

Zadie Smith was born as Sadie Smith in the north-west London borough of Brent to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and migrated to England in 1969. Their marriage was her father's second. Zadie has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown and the other is rapper Luc Skyz. 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 earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest.

Education

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.

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.

At Cambridge she published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called The Mays Anthology. 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 A. P. Watt. Smith returned to guest-edit the anthology in 2001.

Career

White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, 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 best-seller immediately. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards. The novel was adapted for television in 2002 by Channel 4. Smith also served as writer-in-residence at the ICA in London and subsequently published, as editor, an anthology of sex writing, Piece of Flesh (ICA, 1999), 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 positive as it had been to White Teeth.

After the publication of The Autograph Man, Smith visited the United States as a 2002-03 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University. 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. Some portions of this book presumably are included in the essay collection Changing My Mind, published in November 2009.

The second novel was followed by another, On Beauty (published in September 2005), which is set largely in and around Greater Boston and which attracted more acclaim. This third novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

Later in the same year, Smith published Martha and Hanwell, a book combining two short stories about two troubled characters. Originally published in Granta and The New Yorker, Penguin Books published Martha and Hanwell with a new introduction by Smith as part of their pocket series to celebrate their 70th birthday. 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. In December 2008 she guest-edited the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

After teaching fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts, she joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction as of 1 September 2010. 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." Beginning with the March 2011 issue, extending until October 2011, Smith was the monthly New Books reviewer for Harper's Magazine. Smith's latest 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.

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. Smith later claimed that her involvement had been overstated and that she had simply helped to polish the English dialogue for the film.

In the fall of 2015 Smith further announced that her fifth novel, entitled Swing Time would be published in the fall of 2016.

Personal 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 to 2007, and are now based between New York City and Queen's Park, London. They have two children, Katherine (Kit) and Harvey.

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Novels

• White Teeth (2000)
• The Autograph Man (2002)
• On Beauty (2005)
• NW (2012)
• Swing Time (2016)

Stories

• The Girl with Bangs (2001)
• Martha and Hanwell (2005)
• Hanwell Senior (2007)
• Permission to Enter (2012)
• The Embassy of Cambodia (2013)
• Meet the President! (2013)
• Moonlit Landscape with Bridge (2014)
• Escape From New York (2015)

Non-fiction

• Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009)
• "Some Notes on Attunement" (2013), published in The New Yorker and later featured in The Best American Essays 2013
• Feel Free (2016)

As editor

• Piece of Flesh (2001), an anthology of erotic short stories featuring Daren King, Toby Litt and Matt Thorne.
• The Book of Other People (2007)

Critical studies and reviews

• Smallwood, Christine (November 2012). "Mental weather: the many voices of Zadie Smith". Reviews. Harper's Magazine 325 (1950): 86-90. Review of NW.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]