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Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith (born October 27, 1975) is an English novelist. To date she has written three novels. In the early 2000s, Smith has been celebrated as one of Britain's most talented young authors; in 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Childhood and background

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 and an English father. Her mother grew up in Jamaica and emigrated 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 Zadie was a teenager.

From childhood on she developed various interests and abilities: as a child she was fond of tap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actor in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist. However, reading and writing always played a major part in her life.

[edit] Studies and career

After being educated at local state schools, including Malorees Junior School, Zadie Smith enrolled in King's College, Cambridge to study English literature. While attending college she published a few short stories in a collection of student writing (see Short stories) called the May Anthologies. A publisher sensed her talent and offered her a contract for publishing her first novel. Zadie 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 market 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 the final year of her studies. When published in 2000 the novel became a bestseller immediately. It was praised internationally and won a number of prizes (see Novels).

She next worked on her second novel, The Autograph Man. 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 was published in 2002 and was a success, but 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 Fellow at Harvard University. 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

Zadie Smith met fellow student Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in the Chapel of King's College in Cambridge. Laird has published a collection of poems, To a Fault, and a novel, Utterly Monkey, early in 2005. Smith and Laird live in Kilburn, North London.

[edit] Works

[edit] Short stories

  • Mirrored Box. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories 1995
  • The Newspaper Man. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories 1996
  • Mrs. Begum's Son and the Private Tutor. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories 1997
  • Picnic, Lightning. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories 1997
  • The Girl with Bangs. In: Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 6, 2001
  • The Trials of Finch. In: The New Yorker Winter Fiction Edition 2002.
  • Martha, Martha. In: Granta 81: Best of Young British Novelists 2003
  • Hanwell in Hell. In: The New Yorker September 27th, 2004.

[edit] Novels

Smith's first novel White Teeth is built around three families - the British and Jamaican Joneses, the Bangladeshi Iqbals and the Jewish Catholic Chalfens - and presents several races, religions, generations and locations. 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 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 black British 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 the Orange Prize for Fiction in June 2006.

[edit] 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 whose The Trial 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.

[edit] Influences

Zadie Smith was a passionate reader from childhood on. Her reading included works by David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, George Eliot, Raymond Carver, E.M. Forster.

[edit] Topics

[edit] 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."

[edit] Essays About Smith's Work Available Online

[edit] External links

[edit] Sources

Squires, Claire White Teeth - A Reader's Guide. Continuum International Publishing Group, New York & London. 2002de:Zadie Smith es:Zadie Smith it:Zadie Smith ja:ゼイディー・スミス pl:Zadie Smith fi:Zadie Smith sv:Zadie Smith

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