Zadie Smith is a British novelist, essayist, and short story writer best known for her novel, White Teeth.
Smith was born in 1975 in London, England. Her mother, Yvonne Bailey had grown up in Jamaica and moved to England in 1969 and her father Harvey Smith was English. As a child, Smith enjoyed tap dancing and briefly considered a career as an actress in musical theatre. She attended Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School before continuing her education at King’s College, Cambridge. Smith studied English Literature at Cambridge and during her time there wrote a number of short stories which were published in a collection of new student writing called The Mays Anthology. Smith’s writing caught the attention of a publisher who offered her a contract for her first novel. She graduated from Cambridge in 1998.
At the age of 21, Smith submitted 80 pages of writing to an agent. The pages would later become White Teeth, and a bidding war was fought for the book which was published several years later in 2000. White Teeth told the story of two best friends, one english and the other a bengali muslim struggling to fit into British society. The novel got rave reviews and won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. White Teeth has since been translated into over twenty languages, and in 2002 it was adapted for television and shown on Channel 4. During this time, Smith was writer-in-residence at the ICA in London and in 1999 she published, as editor, an anthology of sex writing entitled Piece of Flesh.
In 2002, Smith’s second novel The Autograph Man was published and was a commercial success. From 2002 – 2003 Smith became a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University where she began writing a book of essays entitled The Morality of the Novel, aka Fail Better. Selected parts of this book of essays were published in 2009 in the essay collection Changing My Mind. In 2005, Smith published her third novel, On Beauty which dealt with feminism, race, and sex. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. A year later it won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Later that year, Smith published Martha and Hanwell, a book combining two short stories about the two troubled characters. Martha and Hanwell was later published by Penguin Books as part of their pocket series celebrating their 70th birthday. Martha dealt 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.
In 2010, Smith became a tenured professor of fiction at New York University where she continues to teach. Two years later, her fourth novel NW, was published, taking it’s title from the postcode for north-west London. Smith has been a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 2002, she was included on Granta’s list of 20 best young authors in both 2003 and 2013 and her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazine’s TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 list. In 2010, Smith was asked to contribute her ‘10 rules for writing’ to the Guardian. Her rules were:
1.When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3. Don’t romanticise your “vocation.” You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.