Zadie SmithFRSL (born Sadie; 25 October 1975) is an English[1] novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.[2]
Early life and education
Zadie Smith was born on 25 October 1975[3] in Willesden[4] to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith,[5] who was 30 years his wife's senior.[6] At the age of 14, she changed her name from Sadie to Zadie.[7]
Smith's mother grew up in Jamaica and emigrated to England in 1969.[3] Smith's parents divorced when she was a teenager. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers (one is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown, and the other is the rapper Luc Skyz). As a child, Smith was fond of tap dancing,[3] and in her teenage years, she considered a career in musical theatre. While at university, Smith earned money as a jazz singer,[8] and wanted to become a journalist.[9][10]
At Cambridge, Smith published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called The Mays Anthology. They attracted the attention of a publisher, who offered her a contract for her first novel. She decided to contact a literary agent and was taken on by A. P. Watt.[14] Smith returned to guest-edit the anthology in 2001.[15]
Career
Smith's debut novel, White Teeth, was introduced to the publishing world in 1997 before it was completed. On the basis of a partial manuscript, an auction for the rights began, which was won by Hamish Hamilton. Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at the University of Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel immediately became a best-seller and received much acclaim. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Betty Trask Award. The novel was adapted for television in 2002.[3]
In July 2000, Smith's debut work was discussed in a controversial essay of literary criticism by James Wood entitled "Human, All Too Inhuman", where Wood critiques the novel as part of a contemporary genre of hysterical realism where "'[i]nformation has become the new character" and human feeling is absent from contemporary fiction.[16] In an article for The Guardian in October 2001, Smith responded to the criticism by agreeing with the accuracy of the term and with Wood's underlying argument that "any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped".[17] However, she rejected her debut being categorised alongside major authors such as David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, and Don DeLillo, and the dismissal of their own innovations on the basis of being "hysterical realism".[17] Responding earnestly to Wood's concerns about contemporary literature and culture, Smith described her own anxieties as a writer and argued that fiction should be "not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both".[17]
Smith served as writer-in-residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London and subsequently published, as editor, an anthology of sex writing, Piece of Flesh, as the culmination of this role.
Smith's second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although it was not as well received by critics as White Teeth.
After the publication of The Autograph Man, Smith visited the United States as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.[18] She started work on a still-unreleased book of essays, The Morality of the Novel (a.k.a. Fail Better), in which she considers a selection of 20th-century writers through the lens of moral philosophy. Some portions of this book presumably appear in the essay collection Changing My Mind, published in November 2009.[19]
Later in the same year, Smith published Martha and Hanwell, a book that pairs two short stories about two troubled characters, originally published in Granta and The New Yorker respectively. Penguin published Martha and Hanwell with a new introduction by the author as part of their pocket series to celebrate their 70th birthday.[22] 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.[23]
Between March and October 2011, Smith was the monthly New Books reviewer for Harper's Magazine.[26][27] She is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.[28] 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."[29]
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.[37] Smith later said that her involvement in the film, titled High Life, had been overstated and that she had simply helped to polish the English dialogue for the film.[38]
Smith's fifth novel, Swing Time, was published in November 2016. It drew inspiration from Smith's childhood love of tap dancing.[39] It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017.
Smith's first collection of short stories, Grand Union, was published on 8 October 2019. In 2020 she published six essays in a collection entitled Intimations, the royalties from which she said she would be donating to the Equal Justice Initiative and New York’s COVID-19 emergency relief fund.[42]
In 2021, Smith debuted her first play, The Wife of Willesden, which she wrote after learning that her borough in London, Brent, had been selected in 2018 as the 2020 London Borough of Culture. As the most famous current writer from Brent, Smith was the natural choice to author the piece. She chose to adapt "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, recalling how she had translated Chaucer into contemporary English during her studies at Cambridge.[43] The retelling replaces the pilgrimage with a pub crawl set in contemporary London, with the Wife of Bath becoming Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman in her mid-50s who challenges her Auntie P's traditional Christian views on sex and marriage. Like the original tale, Alvita is a woman who has had five husbands, her experiences with them ranging from pleasant to traumatic. The majority of the piece is spent on her talking to the people in the pub, in much the way that the Wife of Bath's prologue is longer than the tale itself. To her, Alvita's voice is a common one that she heard growing up in Brent, and thus writing this play was a natural choice for the festival. The tale itself is set in 17th-century Jamaica, where a man guilty of rape is brought before the Queen, who decrees that his punishment is to go and find what women truly desire.[44][45][46]
In 2023, Smith stated that she had been writing on a historical novel since 2020, focusing on Arthur Orton, who was at the centre of the Tichborne case, a famous 19th-century court case involving identity theft. She said that she tried to avoid Charles Dickens as an influence and subject, but that her research process showed her that there was "really no way to entirely avoid Mr. Charles Dickens" since several of the places and events of her story had a relation to him.[47] The book also includes another real-life novelist of the time, William Ainsworth. Smith's historical novel, The Fraud, was published in September 2023.[48][49] Reviewing it for The Independent, Martin Chilton said: "The novel pulls off the trick of being both splendidly modern and authentically old. ... The Fraud is the genuine article."[50] According to Karan Mahajan, writing in The New York Times, "It offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters. ... Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive."[51]
The couple lived in Rome, Italy, from November 2006 to 2007, and lived in New York City, USA and Queen's Park, London,[54] for about 10 years before relocating to Kilburn, London, in 2020. They have two children.[55]
Smith describes herself as "unreligious",[56] and was not raised in a religion, although retains a "curiosity" about the role religion plays in others' lives.[57] In an essay exploring humanist and existentialist views of death and dying, Smith characterises her worldview as that of a "sentimental humanist".[58][59][60]
Zadie Smith's favourite book is Middlemarch by George Eliot.[61] She tells Eleanor Wachtel, in an interview for Brick, A Literary Journal, that Middlemarch was "just an extraordinary achievement in a novel. It's so diverse and gigantic—its concentration is so diffuse. It's a social novel, which England has always aspired to; at the same time, it's a great philosophical novel, like its continental cousins."[62]
2022: received the Bodley Medal, the Bodleian Libraries' highest honour, "awarded to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the worlds of books and literature, libraries, media and communications, science and philanthropy", presented by Richard Ovenden.[79]
2022: PEN/Audible Literary Service Award in recognition of Smith's "remarkable achievements as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work displays unparalleled attention to craft and humane ideals".[80][81]
2023: The Fraud was awarded the inaugural Westport Prize for Literature, established by The Westport Library to honour "an original work of fiction that explores issues in contemporary society"[83]
^Smith, Zadie (2018), "Man versus Corpse", Feel Free: Essays, London: Penguin UK
^Smith, Zadie (2010). "Generation Why?". The New York Review of Books. 57 (18). "When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendant experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears."
Kalpaklı, Fatma. "British Novelists and Indian Nationalism: Contrasting Approaches in the Works of Mary Margaret Kaye, James Gordon Farrell and Zadie Smith", Bethesda: Academica Press, 2010. ISBN978-193-314-677-5.
