Zadie Smith was born on October 25, 1975 in London, England to a Jamaican mother and an English father who divorced when she was a teenager. Around the same time, she changed her name from Sadie to Zadie and began to exhibit a major interest in literature.
Smith attended King’s College, Cambridge in the 1990s where she studied English literature. While at Cambridge, she published a number of short stories in a collection of student writing called The Mays Anthology. These pieces attracted the attention of a publisher, who offered her a novel contract while she was still in school.
Her first novel, White Teeth, was completed during Smith’s final year at Cambridge and published in 2000. It became an immediate commercial and critical success, propelling her to literary notoriety at a very young age. She earned several awards for this novel and made Time magazine’s list of 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923-2005.
Smith’s sophomore novel, The Autograph Man, received much less critical acclaim. In interviews, Smith admitted that she suffered a bout of writer’s block after the overwhelming success of White Teeth. However, her third novel, On Beauty, received much more praise and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
In the same year, Smith published Martha and Hanwell, a book combining two short stories: “Martha, Martha” and “Hanwell in Hell”. Smith’s most recent novel, NW, was published in 2012.
Smith taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts before becoming a tenured professor at New York University where she teaches fiction.
Smith was interviewed by The Guardian Newspaper in 2010 about her ten rules for writing. You can read these rules here. Among them, one of my favorites: “Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied”. Very remniscent of Dickinson.
Check out a copy of one of Smith’s works at your local library or purchase your own copy. As always, support small/secondhand bookstores and shop local if you choose to buy!
[Special thanks to Justin Ericksen, in whose class I first read White Teeth and developed my appreciation for Zadie Smith whilst probably annoying him with my endless babbling about it during office hours.]
Sources:
watchtheFruits 
