Zadie Smith

Smith's mother grew up in Jamaica and emigrated to England in 1969.

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, and in her teenage years, she considered a career in musical theatre.

While at university, Smith earned money as a jazz singer, and wanted to become a journalist.

Despite earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest.

Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School, then King's College, Cambridge, where she studied English literature.

Penguin published Martha and Hanwell with a new introduction by the author as part of their pocket series to celebrate their 70th birthday.

Zadie Smith FRSL (born Sadie; 25 October 1975) is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer.

Zadie Smith was born on 25 October 1975 in Willesden to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith, who was 30 years his wife's senior.

At the age of 14, she changed her name from Sadie to Zadie.

Smith's début 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 was begun, which was won by Hamish Hamilton.

Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at the University of Cambridge.

Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2000, Smith corrected a newspaper assertion that she left Cambridge with a double First.

"Actually, I got a Third in my Part Ones," she said.

She graduated with upper second-class honours.

While at university Smith auditioned unsuccessfully for the Cambridge Footlights.

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.

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.

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.

Smith returned to guest-edit the anthology in 2001.

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".

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.

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".

Smith 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.

The novel was adapted for television in 2002.

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.

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.

Smith's third novel, On Beauty, was published in September 2005.

It is set largely in and around Greater Boston.

It attracted more acclaim than The Autograph Man: it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

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.

Some portions of this book presumably appear in the essay collection Changing My Mind, published in November 2009.

She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.