Book, Novel
Zadie Smith
Since Winning the EMMA Award
Zadie Smith is a British-Jamaican Novelist, Essayist and Short Story Writer, whose 2002 novel, The Autograph Man, a story of loss, obsession and the nature of celebrity, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction. In 2003 and 2013, Granta magazine named Zadie one of the 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’.
Zadie’s 2005 novel, On Beauty, won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction, and her 2012 novel NW was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction as well as being named as one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2012. In 2020, the New York Public Library voted White Teeth as one of the 125 most important books during the last 125 years.
Zadie has written for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and has received many honors, including the City College of New York’s Langston Hughes Medal and the St. Louis Literary Award. Zadie Smith’s work has been widely celebrated for her treatment of race, religion, and cultural identity and her novels’ eccentric characters, savvy humor, and snappy dialogue. She has become one of the most important contemporary British writers.
Background (Before 2000)
Zadie Smith was born in Willisden, North West London, to a Jamaican mother and an English father, giving her mixed heritage. Zadie’s debut novel, White Teeth, was introduced to the publishing world in 1997 before it was even completed. She began writing it while studying at Cambridge and published it in 2000.
After her EMMA 2000 recognition, which was her first award, White Teeth won several awards and prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). It has also been translated into over twenty languages and adapted for television and the stage.
