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Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
BornOctober 27, 1975
England Brent, London, England
OccupationNovelist, essayist
NationalityEngland English
Period2000-present
Literary movementhysterical 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.[1] 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

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 theOrange 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

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

Political essay on war in Iraq.

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

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

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

Essay on the topic of Holidays

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

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

Interview with Zadie Smith and brother Doc Brown

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

Sources

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

  1. ^ "Zadie Smith", Granta
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