Black History Month - Zadie Smith

Black History Month: 19 October 2020

 

Zadie Smith, most well known for her debut novel White Teeth, was born in 1975 in London to an English father and Jamaican mother. During her teen years she enjoyed musical theatre and tap dancing and earned money as a jazz singer at university. Despite her initial interest in journalism, she studied English at Cambridge, and published White Teeth in 2000. It details three ethnically diverse families in London, and won several awards for its portrayal, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. The novel was adapted for television in 2002. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002, and while gaining the same critical reception as White Teeth, was a commercial success. She also became Writer in Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and became a professor of fiction at New York University in 2010. 

 

Want to find out more about Zadie Smith? Click here for more information, or here for more about her work.