Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith
Born	October 27, 1975 Brent, London, England
Occupation	Novelist, essayist
Nationality	English
Period	2000-present
Literary movement	hysterical realism

Zadie Smith (born October 27, 1975) is an English novelist. To date she has written three novels, and is widely regarded as one of England's most talented young authors; in 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors.

Biography

Early life

Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith (she changed her name when she was 14) 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. It was her father's second marriage. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper Doc Brown. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager.

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. Literature, however, came to be her principal interest.

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. 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.

White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, long before it was completed. On the basis of a partial script 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).

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 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. [1] She started work on a book of essays, The Morality of the Novel, in which she considers a selection of 20th century writers through the lens of moral philosophy.

Her third novel, On Beauty, was published in September 2005 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The book won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Private life

Smith met Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in the Chapel of King's College. Smith dedicated On Beauty "for my dear Laird." Laird has published a collection of poems, To a Fault, and a novel, Utterly Monkey, early in 2005. The couple lives in North London, UK.

Works

Short stories

• Mirrored Box. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories 1995
• The Newspaper Man. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories 1996
• Mrs. Begum's Son and the Private Tutor. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories 1997
• Picnic, Lightning. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories 1997
• "Stuart***". In: The New Yorker Winter Fiction Issue 1999.
• The Girl with Bangs. In: Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 6, 2001
• The Trials of Finch. In: The New Yorker Winter Fiction Issue 2002.
• Martha, Martha. In: Granta 81: Best of Young British Novelists 2003
• Hanwell in Hell. In: The New Yorker 27 September, 2004.
• Hanwell Senior. In: The New Yorker 14 May, 2007.

Novels

White Teeth (2000)

Smith's first novel White Teeth is built around three families - the British and Jamaican Joneses, the Bangladeshi Iqbals and the Jewish Catholic Chalfens. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award 2000, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, the Betty Trask Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. In 2002 the story of White Teeth was made into a short TV series for Channel 4.

The Autograph Man (2002)

Her second novel, The Autograph Man, follows the progress of a Jewish/Chinese Londoner named Alex-Li Tandem, who buys and sells autographs for a living and is obsessed with celebrities. Smith's second novel won the Jewish Quarterly Review's Wingate Literary Prize 2003.

On Beauty (2005)

Her third novel, On Beauty, which takes its title from an essay by Elaine Scarry (On Beauty and Being Just), follows the lives of a mixed race British-American family living in America. A short article in the Guardian has described it as a transatlantic comic saga. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize on September 8, 2005. She gave a preview reading of her third novel at the Oxford Literary Festival in April 2005. This book won Smith the Orange Prize for Fiction in June 2006.

Collections

• Piece of Flesh (2001)

Anthology of erotic short stories featuring Daren King, Toby Litt and Matt Thorne. Published as part of tenure as Writer in Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Essays and others

• "On the Road: American Writers and Their Hair".

Essay written to be read aloud at Neal Pollack's Timothy McSweeney's Festival of Literature, Theater, and Music, 2001.

• "We proceed in Iraq as hypocrites and cowards - and the world knows it". In: The Guardian, 27th February, 2003.

Political essay on war in Iraq.

• "The divine Ms H". In: The Guardian, 1st July, 2003.

Essay on Katharine Hepburn for the film features section of The Guardian.

• "The Limited Circle is Pure". In: The New Republic, 3rd November 2003.
  

An article written by Zadie Smith on Franz Kafka, for a 2005 reissue of The Trial, for which she also wrote a foreword.

• "Love, Actually". In: The Guardian, 1st November 2003
  

Article on EM Forster, based on a lecture given the Gielgud Theatre in London on October 22, 2003.

• Doodle from the Guardian Hay festival 2004

• "You Are In Paradise". In: The New Yorker, 14th June, 2004.
  

Essay on the topic of Holidays

• "Shades of Greene". In: The Guardian, 18th September, 2004

Introduction to the centenary edition of The Quiet American by Graham Greene.

• "The Zen of Eminem". In: Vibe, 2005.
  

An article on the rap star Eminem for the American magazine on urban music and culture Vibe.

• "We are family" In: The Guardian, 4th March, 2005

Interview with Zadie Smith and brother Doc Brown

• "Nature's Work of Art". In: The Guardian G2 section, 15th September 2005.
  

An article on Greta Garbo.

• "Fail better". In: The Guardian, 13th January 2007

• "What does soulful mean?" An article on Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. In: The Guardian, 1st September 2007.

Topics

Multiculturalism

In an interview with Amazon.co.uk, Smith says about her presentation of culture and community in White Teeth: "I just wanted to show that there are communities that function well. There's sadness for the way tradition is fading away but I wanted to show people making an effort to understand each other, despite their cultural differences."

Essays About Smith's Work Available Online

• "A Thing of Beauty?", a review of On Beauty in The Oxonian Review of Books
• "White Knees", an essay on Smith's body of work by Wyatt Mason in the October 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine.

External links

• http://www.literati.net/ZSmith/index.htm (some information about the author, with contact e-mail address)
• http://www.authortrek.com/zadiesmithpage.html (provides a good glossary for a closer look at "White Teeth" and links to interviews online)
• http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,809618,00.html (a review of White Teeth in the Guardian, a controversial approach and critic, but nevertheless interesting.
• http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,780206,00.html (an article in the Guardian on the TV adaptation of White Teeth)
• http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_0140276335,00.html?sym=MIS An A-Z by Zadie Smith (an amusing small collection of thoughts and bits from Zadie Smith)
• http://books.guardian.co.uk/booksoftheyear2004/story/0,15602,1365941,00.html Season's Readings - Writers and guest critics recommend their favourites, from bestsellers to the undeservedly obscure In this article is a short paragraph with Zadie Smith's reading recommendations of 2004.
• Girl Wonder: The life so far of multiracial literary sensation Zadie Smith.
• Only Connect: From White Teeth to the ivory tower.
• Zadie Smith's Culture Warriors
• She's young, black, British - and the first publishing sensation of the millennium
• Assessing literary it girl Zadie Smith

Sources

Squires, Claire White Teeth - A Reader's Guide. Continuum International Publishing Group, New York & London. 2002