Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith: An Evening of Reading and Reflection Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021, 5:30PM Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Novelist Zadie Smith was born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She read English at Cambridge, before graduating in 1997.

Her acclaimed first novel, "White Teeth" (2000), is a vibrant portrait of contemporary multicultural London, told through the stories of three ethnically diverse families. The book won a number of awards and prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book), and two BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards (Best Book/Novel and Best Female Media Newcomer). It was also shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Author's Club First Novel Award. "White Teeth" has been translated into over twenty languages and was adapted for television in autumn 2002, and for the stage in November 2018. In 2020, the New York Public Library voted "White Teeth" one of the 125 most important books of the last 125 years. 

Smith's "The Autograph Man" (2002), a story of loss, obsession, and the nature of celebrity, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction. In 2003 and 2013, she was named by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. "On Beauty" won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and her novel "NW" was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was named as one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2012. NW was also made into a television film by the BBC in 2016. Her novel "Swing Time" was a New York Times bestseller. She has published three collections of essays, "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays" (2009), "Feel Free" (2018), and "Intimations" which was chosen as one of Oprah's Best Books of 2020. Her collection of short stories, "Grand Union," was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Her play, "The Wife of Willesden," based on Chaucer’s "The Wife of Bath’s Tale" will premiere at the Kiln Theatre. In 2021 she co-wrote a children's book with Nick Laird titled "Weirdo," with illustrations by Magenta Fox. She is currently working on a new novel.   

Smith writes regularly for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. In 2017 she was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and received the 2017 City College of New York’s Langston Hughes Medal. She is also the recipient of the 2021 St. Louis Literary Award. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of Creative Writing at New York University. 

Professor Smith's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by Center for Writing and Public Discourse and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, both at CMC.