Zadie Smith

Standard Name: Smith, Zadie
Birth Name: Sadie Smith
Self-constructed Name: Zadie
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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Naomi Alderman
NA says this book was facilitated by the success of fictions about other, distinct communities: Zadie Smith 's White Teeth, Monica Ali 's Brick Lane, and especially influenced by Jeanette Winterson 's Oranges...
Literary responses Graham Greene
This novel was filmed in 1958 and again in 2002, two successive interpretations which have made it probably Greene's best-known work.. Murray Sayle recently called it still the best book about America in Vietnam...
Literary responses Zora Neale Hurston
Zadie Smith was given this novel at the age of fourteen by her mother, who wanted to raise her biracial consciousness. In her collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Smith recalls that she finished...
Reception A. S. Byatt
David Jays , in an article confessing his preference for the current lionesses to the lions among British novelists—a preference, that is, for ASB , Zadie Smith , A. L. Kennedy , Sarah Waters ...
Textual Production Kamila Shamsie
Other authors in the volume include Zadie Smith , Naomi Alderman , and Xiaolu Guo .
Freeman, John, editor. “Introduction: Best of Young British Novelists 4”. Granta.

Timeline

16 October 1987
In the early hours of the morning a violent storm battered the south of England, with winds reaching a hundred kilometres an hour in some places.
December 2001
Women writers for the first time outnumbered men in the Guardian newspaper's annual listing of the fastest-selling paperbacks in Britain.
June 2003
The relatively obscure New Orleans writer Valerie Martin beat the young and already famous Zadie Smith and Donna Tartt to win the Orange Award for Fiction with her novelProperty.
February 2008
Award-winning British author Zadie Smith stirred up controversy by accusing most literary prizes of being only nominally about literature.
Smith, Zadie. “Breaking news: Short story competition result 2008”. The Willesden Herald.