Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith

Photo: BrooklynHeathen.com
Born October 25, 1975
Brent, London, England
Occupation Novelist, essayist
Nationality English
Writing period 2000-present
Literary movement realism, postmodernism
Influences

Zadie Smith (born October 25, 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. 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. When she was 14, she changed her name to "Zadie."

[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.

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.[3] 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.

[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 live in Monti (rione of Rome), Rome, Italy.

[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. ^ 2002-2003 Radcliffe Institute Fellows

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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