Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith (1975 - ) was born in northwest London and grew up in circumstances common and unsurprising, nothing remarkable, nothing unusual, nothing foreshadowing the explosion she made on the literary scene when she was 18. That year an uncompleted manuscript of a novel was seized upon the London publishing world and auctioned for the privilege of publishing it. The novel, White Teeth, became the sensation of the decade. Smith has gone to fulfill and expand that promise.
Besides White Teeth, she is the author of the novels The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia, and two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free. Zadie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
NW
NW
One of the New York Times Book Review‘s 10 Best Books of 2012
Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four locals—Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan—as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. In private houses and public parks, at work and at play, these Londoners inhabit a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end. Depicting the modern urban zone—familiar to city-dwellers everywhere—NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.