Smith, Zadie (1975-…), is a British author. She has won praise for her novels that explore the lives of characters of different or mixed races, ethnic groups, and social classes. Smith’s fiction concentrates on characters of British, West Indian, South Asian, and East Asian ancestry. Her novels examine how immigrants to the United Kingdom and British-born children of immigrant parents deal with cultural conflicts and issues of personal identity.
Smith established herself as a major writer with her first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel follows the lifelong friendship between a white working-class London man and a Muslim man from Bangladesh. Smith explores race, religion, gender, and conflicts between younger and older generations. Her second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), centers on a half-Chinese, half-Jewish young man who sells celebrity autographs for a living and his obsessive search for an elusive autograph by a retired, reclusive movie actress.
The novel On Beauty (2005) is set in a fictional university near Boston and follows two professors and their families. One professor is a white Englishman with an African American wife. The other is a professor from Trinidad, married to a Caribbean-born woman. The novel recounts the tensions between the two men over their conflicting attitudes on social issues.
In NW (2012), Smith introduces four friends—Leah, Felix, Keisha (renamed Natalie) and Nathan—who are of different racial and ethnic backgrounds but who grew up in the same poverty-stricken area of London. The postal code for the area is the NW of the title. The four weave through each other’s lives as they grow from childhood to young adulthood, struggling to find some certainty in their lives. Swing Time (2016) follows the lives of two mixed-race English girls from their friendship in childhood into early adult life. The Fraud (2023) is a historical novel based on a criminal trial that took place in London in the 1860’s and 1870’s.
Sadie Smith was born in London on Oct. 25, 1975. Her father was British, and her mother was Jamaican. She changed her first name to Zadie when she was 14. Smith received a B.A. degree from Cambridge University in 1998. She became a professor of fiction at New York University in 2010. Collections of her essays on writing, current events, and other topics include Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018), and Intimations (2020). Smith has also written many short stories, including those collected in Grand Union (2019).
