Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith, originally named Sadie Smith, is a British author known for her treatment of race, religion, and cultural identity and for her novels’ eccentric characters, savvy humour, and snappy dialogue. She became a sensation in the literary world with the publication of her first novel, White Teeth, in the year 2000.

Smith began writing poems and stories as a child and later studied English literature at the University of Cambridge in 1998. While there, she started writing her first novel and at the age of 21, she submitted some 80 pages to an agent. The book was eventually sold to Hamish Hamilton. Smith took many years to complete her first story, and it was finally published to rave reviews.

Her work prompted critics to hail Smith as a modern-day Charles Dickens. The ambitious novel won numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2000, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. The author’s second novel,The Autograph Man, was published in 2002. Then cameOn Beautyin 2005, which further established Smith as one of the foremost British novelists of her day. With NW and her fifth novel, Swing Time, the gifted wordsmith continued to explore various issues of human interests. Smith also edited and contributed to the short-story collectionThe Book of Other Peoplein 2007 and published the essay collections Changing My Mind in 2009 and Feel Free in 2018.