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.
On Beauty
On Beauty
Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth
Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith’s reputation as a major literary talent.