22 Facts About Zadie Smith

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

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

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.

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

Zadie Smith has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers.

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

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

Zadie 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.

Later in the same year, Zadie 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.

Between March and October 2011, Zadie Smith was the monthly New Books reviewer for Harper's Magazine.

Zadie Smith is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

In September 2013, Zadie Smith appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, with her book choice being Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.

Zadie Smith later said that her involvement in the film, titled High Life, had been overstated and that she had simply helped to polish the English dialogue for the film.

Zadie Smith is a contributor to Margaret Busby's 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.

In 2021, Zadie Smith debuted her first play, The Wife of Willesden, which she wrote after learning that her borough in London, Brent, had been selected in 2018 as the 2020 London Borough of Culture.

Zadie Smith chose to adapt "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, recalling how she had translated Chaucer into contemporary English during her studies at Cambridge.

In 2023, Zadie Smith stated that she had been writing a historical novel since 2020, focusing on Arthur Orton, who was at the centre of the Tichborne case, a famous 19th-century court case involving identity theft, but spans the period from 1830s to the 1870s.

Zadie Smith said that she tried to avoid Charles Dickens as an influence and subject, but that her research process showed her that there was "really no way to entirely avoid Mr Charles Dickens" since several of the places and events of her story had a relation to him.

Zadie Smith describes herself as "unreligious", and was not raised in a religion, although retains a "curiosity" about the role religion plays in others' lives.

Zadie Smith was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002.

Zadie Smith joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on 1 September 2010.

Zadie Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2006 and her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.