Zadie Smith

British · born 1975

Born Sadie Smith on October 25, 1975, in Willesden, north-west London, to a Jamaican mother who had emigrated to England in 1969 and an English father thirty years her senior, she was a tap-dancing, musical-theatre-loving girl who changed her name from Sadie to Zadie at fourteen because it sounded better. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. She read English at King's College, Cambridge, graduating with upper-second honours, earning money by singing jazz in the evenings. Short stories she published in the student anthology The Mays attracted an agent's notice, and a publishing auction for her unfinished first novel was won by Hamish Hamilton before she had completed her final year. White Teeth appeared in January 2000, the day she finished the manuscript at Cambridge, and became an immediate best-seller, winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award; the book was praised internationally and adapted for television in 2002. The Autograph Man (2002) was followed by On Beauty (2005), shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, then NW (2012), set in the same Kilburn postcode where she had grown up, and Swing Time (2016). She became a tenured professor of fiction at New York University in 2010. Her essays, collected in Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018), and Intimations (2020), have made her one of the indispensable critics of her generation, writing on Zora Neale Hurston, dancing, Brexit, and the experience of teaching across two cities. She lives in north-west London with her husband, the Northern Irish poet Nick Laird, and their two children, returning often to the streets that first taught her how a novel should sound.