Zadie Smith
born on 27 October 1975 in London. British author.
Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith in Brent, North London, to a lower middle-class family. Her mother Yvonne Bailey-Smith, a psychotherapist, migrated to England from Jamaica at age fifteen and married Smith’s father Harvey, a British war veteran who worked as a commercial photographer and later as a paper salesman. Harvey Smith was more than 20 years older than his second wife and had a son and a daughter from his first marriage. Smith grew up with her two brothers, Ben and Luke, in Willesden, an area in suburban north-west London that attracted large numbers of new migrants from the 1970s onwards. At the age of fourteen she changed her name to Zadie. At fifteen her parents divorced. As a teenager Smith loved watching black and white Hollywood films, musicals and reading and started writing poems and stories when she was five. Among her favourite writers were C.S. Lewis, E.M. Forster, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. The influence of these writers is obvious in Smith’s own writing (Walters 2).
Zadie Smith studied English Literature at Cambridge University and aspired a career in journalism. During that time she published a number of short stories in The May Anthologies, the college’s literary journal. The short story “Mrs. Begum” about multi-culturalism, hybridity and the interplay between Whites and South Asians brought her to the attention of a literary agent and she received a £250,000 two-book deal. She completed her first novel, White Teeth, while still at Cambridge and published it after her graduation in 2000. White Teeth deals with issues of race and the experience of immigrants in working-class and middle-class England and became an instant bestseller. It won several literary prizes including the 2000 Whitebread Book Award and the Guardian First Book award and made Smith an international celebrity. Critics praised Smith for dealing with numerous themes including religious fundamentalism, postcolonialism, hybridity, aesthetics, and multiculturalism in a humorous way (Walters 2). The novel was so successful that it was turned into a television series in 2002.
Smith’s success was accompanied by a growing media interest in Smith herself. Her biracial heritage, age, talent and newfound wealth were points of interest for the public which turned her into a cultural icon and saw her as a representative of multiculturalism and diversity. However, Smith rejects the multicultural title ascribed to her (Walters 2). She does not regard herself as an immigrant and refutes claims that White Teeth is fundamentally autobiographical: “The people in White Teeth are immigrants. I’m not an immigrant, so it’s a different experience. But I was around people who had that experience, who felt separated or cut in two, who had moved from one country to another, who had that sense of leading two lives” (Tew 28).
In 2002 Smith published The Autograph Man, a metafictional text which follows the fortunes of a Jewish-Chinese purveyor of autographs grieving the loss of his father. Similarly to White Teeth, the novel deals with themes of cultural hybridity and identity, but also with celebrity, the obsessional, and the nature of love and friendship. The novel was successful but not to the same extent as her debut.
On Beauty (2005) is her third novel. It is a postmodern adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel Howards End and deals with a mixed-race British-American family living in a university town in the U.S. The novel focuses on questions of aesthetics, campus politics, and identity. It won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize.
In 2009 Smith published Changing My Mind, a collection of previously published essays about writing and reading.
Smith is currently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
Zadie Smith is one of Britain’s most successful and well-known Black and British writers. In addition to her three novels she has also published numerous short stories, essays and has edited a number of anthologies.
In 2004 she married fellow writer Nick Laird whom she met at Cambridge. The couple live in New York and London and have a daughter, Katherine (born in 2009).
Literary Awards
Smith has received numerous literary awards including the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Award. She was also nominated for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Sources
- Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- Walters, Tracey L. “Introduction.” Zadie Smith. Critical Essays. Ed. Tracey L.Walter. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 1-6.