Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith
Smith announcing the 2010 National Book Critics Circle award finalists in fiction.
Born	Sadie Smith (1975-10-25) 25 October 1975 Brent, London, England
Occupation	Novelist, professor of creative writing
Nationality	British
Alma mater	King's College, Cambridge
Period	2000–present
Literary movement	Realism, postmodernism, hysterical realism, New Sincerity
Spouse	Nick Laird (2004–present)
Children	2
Zadie Smith's voice Recorded September 2013 from the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs

Zadie Smith FRSL (born on 25 October 1975)^[1] is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002. In a 2004 BBC poll of cultural researchers, Smith was named among the top twenty most influential people in British culture.^[2][3]

As of 2016, she has published five novels, all of which have received substantial critical praise. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors,^[4] and was also included in the 2013 list.^[5] She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on 1 September 2010.^[6] Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction^[7] and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2006^[8] and her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazine's list of 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

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.^[9] Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and migrated to England in 1969.^[1] 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;^[1] 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".^[10] 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.^[11]

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.^[12]

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.^[13] Smith returned to guest-edit the anthology in 2001.^[14]

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.^[1] 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.^[15] 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.^[16]

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,^[17] and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.^[8]

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.^[18] 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.^[19] In December 2008 she guest-edited the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.^[20]

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."^[21] Beginning with the March 2011 issue, extending until October 2011, Smith was the monthly New Books reviewer for Harper's Magazine.^[22][23] Smith's 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. NW was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction.^[24]

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.^[25] Smith later claimed that her involvement had been overstated and that she had simply helped to polish the English dialogue for the film.^[26]

In the autumn of 2015 Smith further announced that her fifth novel, entitled Swing Time, would be published in the fall of 2016.^[27]

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.^[28] They have two children, Katherine (Kit) and Harvey.^[29]

Bibliography

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)
• Two Men Arrive in a Village (2016)^[30]

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.

Awards and recognition

• White Teeth: won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award. Included on Time magazine's 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005
• The Autograph Man: won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize
• On Beauty: won the Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award (Eurasia Section), and the Orange Prize for Fiction; shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
• NW: shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction
• Granta′s Best of Young British Novelists, 2003 and 2013
• 2016 Welt-Literaturpreis^[31]

Notes

References

• Tew, Philip (ed). Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
• Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Walters, Tracey (ed.). Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. New York: Peter Lang Publications, 2008.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Zadie Smith.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Zadie Smith

• "Girl Wonder" on Salon.com (2000).
• Joy Press, "Only Connect", an interview with Zadie Smith in the Village Voice, 13 September 2005.
• Stephanie Merritt, "She's young, black, British – and the first publishing sensation of the millennium", The Observer, 16 January 2000.
• Wyatt Mason, "White Knees", an essay on Smith's body of work, Harper's Magazine, October 2005.
• Smith article archive from The New York Review of Books
• "Mind the Gap" in Guernica Magazine, January 2012.
• Broadcaster Philippa Thomas on the London of Zadie Smith's NW, London Fictions, 2012.
• Alison Flood, "Zadie Smith criticises author who says more than one child limits career", The Guardian, 13 June 2013
• Zadie Smith on Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 22 September 2013.