Sadie Smith

Zadie Smith (born Sadie Zadie Smith on 27 October 1975) is a British novelist, essayist, and short-story writer regarded as one of the defining voices of contemporary English literature. Born in Willesden, North London, to a Jamaican mother and an English father, she adopted the name "Zadie" as a teenager and later studied English literature at King's College, Cambridge, where her talent attracted immediate publishing attention.

Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), became an international sensation, capturing multicultural London with exuberance and wit, and winning the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Betty Trask Award. Her subsequent novels include The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, NW (2012), Swing Time (2016), and The Fraud (2023), her first historical novel.

Equally acclaimed as an essayist, she has published the collections Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018), and Intimations (2020), along with the story collection Grand Union (2019). A professor of creative writing at New York University, Smith is celebrated for her dazzling prose and her searching explorations of race, identity, family, and class in modern Britain.