Zadie Smith

Biography

Zadie Smith was born on October 27, 1975. Originally named Sadie, she was the daughter of a white English father and a Black Jamaican mother. She grew up in Willesden Green, a multicultural suburb northwest of London where she later set her first novel, White Teeth. She had two half-siblings from her father’s first marriage and two younger brothers. Sadie changed her name to Zadie when she was a teenager, liking the more exotic sound the letter change gave to the name.

Smith’s ambition as a child was to perform in musical theater; she studied tap dancing for many years. Realizing that the types of productions she most admired were no longer being made, she gradually shifted her interest to writing. Her parents divorced while she was a teenager. She graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in English, and wrote White Teeth while still a student there. She was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University in 2002–3, taking graduate courses in English literature. Smith married the poet Nick Laird in 2004, and the two moved to North London.

The rights to White Teeth were purchased before the book was completed, and the novel was a bestseller and a critical success. The book chronicles the friendship of white, working-class Archie, from London, and Samad, a Muslim from Bangladesh. Smith participated in a writer-in-residence program at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London following the success of her first novel. She also was the editor of an anthology of erotic stories titled Piece of Flesh (2001), for which she authored the introduction.

Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), has as its main character a half-Jewish, half-Chinese man who collects autographs of famous people. After taking time for graduate study and writing literary criticism, Smith returned to fiction for her third novel, On Beauty (2005). Smith was awarded the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book), the W. H. Smith Award for Best New Talent, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction, and the 2006 Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly called the Orange Prize). She was short-listed for the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2001 and 2003).

Literary critic James Wood coined the term “hysterical realism” to describe White Teeth. The term caught on with critics, and Smith has agreed that its definition fits her prose. Hysterical realism is characterized by manic characters and frequent digressions from the main plotline. The overblown treatment of subject matter is combined with realistic or even journalistic material.

Smith was included on several lists of the most promising young writers in Britain. Her fiction is noted not only for its stylistic interest and humor, but also for her treatment of race as subject matter. Her multiracial characters break free of racial stereotypes; race in the novels is not a static quantity that defines or limits the characters.

Smith took a break from fiction for a number of years, though she continued to write. In 2009, she published a nonfiction collection, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. She discusses writing, personal stories, and a range of cultural topics and figures, from the former President Barack Obama to feminism. Smith joined the faculty of the creative writing program at New York University as a tenured professor. Smith has also taught at Columbia University.

In 2012, Smith published her fourth novel, NW, named for the postal code of the London borough that serves as its setting. In the novel, Smith returns again to Willesden. The book is divided into four parts, each following a different character, all of whom grew up in the same housing estate. NW’s form is more experimental than her previous works, but sees Smith exploring again, with irony and wisdom, the state of race and class relations.

In 2013, she published a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia. Smith published her fifth novel, Swing Time, in November 2016. The work further explored many of Smith’s trademark themes, including race, class, and friendship. Smith has also contributed to the New Yorker since 1999, as a fiction writer and an essayist. In 2021, the author published her first play, The Wife of Willesden.

Smith announced in 2023 that she had been working on a historical novel since 2020. The novel was based on the life of Arthur Orton, who was heavily involved in a nineteenth century court case regarding identity theft. The novel, entitled The Fraud, was published in 2023. That same year, Smith was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

In 2024, one of the essays Smith published in the New Yorker (“Sibboleth”) focused on protests in campuses over Gaza, which drew criticism. This article also appeared in her 2025 publication Dead and Alive, a collection of essays across a range of subjects, from politics and art to pop and contemporary culture, as well as her personal reflections. The collection includes about thirty essays divided into five sections.

Zadie Smith married her husband, Nick Laird, in 2004. Laird is a poet, novelist, and professor at Columbia University. The couple have two children, Katherine and Harvey. They live in New York City and London.

Author Works

Edited texts:

Piece of Flesh, 2001

The Book of Other People, 2008

Long Fiction:

White Teeth, 2000

The Autograph Man, 2002

On Beauty, 2005

NW, 2012

Swing Time, 2016

The Wife of Wilesden, 2021

The Fraud, 2023

Nonfiction:

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, 2009

Fences: A Brexit Diary, 2016

Feel Free, 2018

Intimations, 2020

Dead and Alive, 2025

Bibliography

Cain, Hamilton. “All the Zadies—Empathetic and Problematic—Are on Display in Her Latest Essay Collection.” Los Angeles Times, 28 Oct. 2025, www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2025-10-28/dead-and-alive-by-zadie-smith. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.

Edemariam, Aida. “Learning Curve.” The Guardian, 2 Sept. 2005.

Eugenides, Jeffrey. “The Pieces of Zadie Smith.” New York Times Magazine, 17 Oct. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/t-magazine/zadie-smith-swing-time-jeffrey-eugenides.html. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.

“New Members Elected in 2023: American Academy of Arts & Sciences.” American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2023, www.amacad.org/news/2023-member-announcement. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.

Smith, Zadie. “In Conversation with Zadie Smith.” Interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Brick, Canada Council for the Arts, Winter 2014.

Wood, Gaby. “The Return of Zadie Smith.” The Telegraph, 25 Aug. 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9495181/The-return-of-Zadie-Smith.html. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.

Wood, James. “James Wood’s Classic Takedown of Faux-Dickensian ‘Hysterical Realism.’” The New Republic, 24 July 2000.

“Zadie Smith.” British Council: Literature, British Council, 2016.