Zadie Smith

Biography

Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in North London to a Jamaican mother and an English father — she is, in biographical terms, Irie Jones. She wrote White Teeth partly during her time at Cambridge, where she was studying English literature, and the novel was famously bid on by publishers before it was finished. She was twenty-four when it was published, and it won the Whitbread First Novel Award. The speed of her rise to literary fame — young, female, mixed-race, writing about multicultural London with Dickensian confidence — made her a cultural phenomenon as much as a novelist.

Zadie Smith at a glance