Birth name
Born
Occupation
Nationality
Sadie Smith
British
October 25, 1975 Brent, London,
Novelist, essayist
Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent to a
Jamaican mother, and an English father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and immigrated to England in 1969. It was her father's second marriage. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper Doc Brown. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager.
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. Literature, however, came to be her principal interest. When she was 14, she changed her name to "Zadie."
Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead
Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature. At Cambridge she published a number of short stories in a collection of student writing 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.
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. Her second novel, The Autograph Man , was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although the critical response was not as unanimously positive as it had been to White Teeth .
Her third novel, On Beauty , was published in September 2005 and was short listed for the Man Booker Prize. The book won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Smith met Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge. The couple live in Monti (rione of Rome), Rome,
Italy.