Early life

Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent – a largely working-class area – to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and emigrated to England in 1969. Their marriage was her father's second. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown and the other is rapper Luc Skyz. As a child she was fond of tap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actress in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist.

Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. When she was 14, she changed her name to "Zadie." Despite earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest and would provide a model for her future career.

Education and career

Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature. In an interview with the Guardian in 2000, Smith was keen to correct a recent newspaper assertion that she left Cambridge with a double First. "Actually, I got a Third in my Part Ones", she said. At Cambridge she published a number of short stories in a collection of student writing (see Short stories) called the May Anthologies. These attracted the attention of a publisher who offered her a contract for her first novel. 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.

Zadie Smith seems to have been rejected for a place in the Cambridge Footlights by the popular British comedy double act Mitchell and Webb, whilst all three were studying at Cambridge University in the 1990s.

White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, long before it was completed. On the basis of a partial manuscript an auction among different publishers for the rights started, with Hamish Hamilton being successful. Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel became a bestseller immediately. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards (see Novels). The novel was adapted for television in 2002 by Channel 4. She also served as "writer in residence" at the ICA in London and subsequently published as editor an anthology of sex writing, Piece of Flesh, as the culmination of this role.

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, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although the critical response was not as close to 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 for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University. She started work on a still unreleased book of essays, The Morality of the Novel, aka 'Fail Better', in which she considers a selection of 20th century writers through the lens of moral philosophy. Some portions of this book presumably are included in the essay collection Changing My Mind, published in November 2009.

The second novel was followed by another, On Beauty, published in September 2005 and which is set largely in and around Greater Boston and which attracted more acclaim. This third novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.

In December 2008 she guest edited the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

After teaching fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts, she joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction as of September 1, 2010.

Private life

Smith met Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge. Smith dedicated On Beauty to "my dear Laird." The couple lived in Monti, Rome, Italy from November 2006—2007 and are now based between New York City and Queen's Park, London. They have a daughter, Katherine (born 2009).

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)
• "Stuart" in The New Yorker Winter Fiction Issue 1999.
• "The Girl with Bangs" in Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 6, 2001.
• "The Trials of Finch" in The New Yorker Winter Fiction Issue 2002.
• "Martha, Martha" in Granta 81: Best of Young British Novelists (2003)
• "Hanwell in Hell" in The New Yorker 27 September 2004.
• "Hanwell Snr" in The New Yorker 14 May 2007; collected in The Book of Other People (2007)

Novels

• White Teeth (2000)
• The Autograph Man (2002)
• On Beauty (2005)

Edited Collections

• Piece of Flesh (2001), an anthology of erotic short stories featuring Daren King, Toby Litt and Matt Thorne.
• The Book of Other People (2007)

Non-Fiction

• "On the Road: American Writers and Their Hair", essay written to be read aloud at Neal Pollack's Timothy McSweeney's Festival of Literature, Theater, and Music, 2001.
• "We proceed in Iraq as hypocrites and cowards - and the world knows it" in The Guardian, 27 February 2003.
• "The divine Ms H" in The Guardian, 1 July 2003, an essay on Katharine Hepburn.
• "The Limited Circle is Pure" in The New Republic, 3 November 2003, an essay on Franz Kafka for a 2005 reissue of The Trial, for which she also wrote a foreword.
• "Love, Actually" in The Guardian, 1 November 2003, an essay on E. M. Forster, based on her lecture at the Gielgud Theatre in London on 22 October 2003.
• "You Are In Paradise" in The New Yorker, 14 June 2004, essay on holidays.
• "Shades of Greene" in The Guardian, 18 September 2004, introduction to the centenary edition of The Quiet American by Graham Greene.
• "The Zen of Eminem" in VIBE 2005, an essay on the rap star Eminem.
• "We are family" in The Guardian, 4 March 2005, an interview by Zadie Smith with her brother Doc Brown.
• "Nature's Work of Art" in The Guardian, 15 September 2005, an essay on Greta Garbo.
• "Fail better" in The Guardian, 13 January 2007, an essay on writing.
• "What does soulful mean?" in The Guardian, 1 September 2007, an essay on Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.
• "F. Kafka, Everyman" in The New York Review of Books, 17 July 2008, a review of The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay, by Louis Begley.
• "Dead man laughing" in The New Yorker, 22 & 29 December 2008, a personal history of humour appreciation in her family.
• Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (Penguin Press, 12 November 2009), a collection of essays on writing.
• "An essay is an act of imagination. It still takes quite as much art as fiction" in The Guardian, 21 November 2009, an essay on the novel.