Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith FRSL is an English short story writer, essayist and novelist. Her name has the post-nominal letters FRSL as she was elected as a fellow in the esteemed Royal Society of Literature in the year 2002. She was also named in the list of the twenty top most influential people in Britain and its culture in the year 2002 by a poll conducted by the BBC researchers. She has published five novels until the year 2016 and all of her novels have received prominent critical praise. She was also on a list of 20 best young authors in the 2003 and 2013 sessions. In the year 2010, she joined New York University as a professor of creative writing.

She has won the Anisfield-World Book Award in the year 2006 and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her famous novel White Teeth has been included in the list of 100 best English Noels by Time Magazine spanning from the year 1932 to 2005. Zadie was born on the 25th of October in the year 1975 in north-west London. Her birth name was Sadie Smith and her parents were her English father Harvey Smith and her Jamaican mother Yvonne Bailey. Her mother migrated to England in the year 1969. Zadie has a half-brother, a half-sister and two younger brothers. One of her brothers is a rapper and the other one is a stand-up comedian.

As a child, Zadie was fond of tap dancing and also considered a profession in acting in the theater. While she was studying at her University, she used to work as a jazz singer and earned money in doing so. In that phase of her life, she aspired to become a journalist. Her parents got divorced when she was a teenager. At the young age of 14, she changed her name to Zadie.

She has attended the Malorees Junior School and the Hampstead Comprehensive School. She studied English Literature further at Cambridge’s King’s College. During college, she published a lot of short stories in a collection called The Mays Anthology. This attracted the attention of a publishing house which offered her the contract for the debut novel. Her first novel was White Teeth which was published in the year 1997. The Autograph Man, On Beauty and Martha and Hanwell, are some of her other works.