Zadie Smith

ZS began publishing in the 1990s with short stories. Her first, acclaimed novel, White Teeth, appeared in January 2000, and much comment on it related it to the new millennium. Smith (whose criticism has also been well received) is a novelist in the comic tradition, steeped in the work of predecessors, and also an icon of the contemporary, who writes of multiracial societies though not directly of race, and for whom movies and television programmes are as resonant as books.
Head-and-shoulders illustration of Zadie Smith by Jillian Tamaki for the "New York Times", 17 November 2016. Smith looks askance at the viewer, wearing a blue turban or head-wrap and a top striped in rust-coloured, blue, and white.

Milestones

27 October 1975

Sadie (later Zadie) Smith was born at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.
Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. Palgrave Macmillan.
3-4

1995

From this year until 1997, The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories annually included writing by ZS . She headed her earliest printed work, the story Mirrored Box, 1995, with a quote from Zora Neale Hurston .
Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. Palgrave Macmillan.
170, 149

January 2000

ZS published her tumultuous and encyclopedic first novel,
Kermode, Frank. “Here she is”. London Review of Books, pp. 13-14.
14
White Teeth (which had hit the headlines in 1997 for a publisher's advance of £250,000). It garnered a fistful of awards.

Biography

Birth and Family

27 October 1975

Sadie (later Zadie) Smith was born at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.
Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. Palgrave Macmillan.
3-4

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