Zadie Smith Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent – a largely working-class area – to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne McLean, and an English father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and immigrated to England in 1969. Their marriage was her father's second. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown and the other is rapper Luc Skyz.

Smith studied King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature At Cambridge she published a number of short stories in a collection of student writing. These attracted the attention of a publisher who offered her a contract for her first novel.

As a child she was fond of lap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actress in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. When she was 14, she changed her name to "Zadie." Despite other earlier ambitions, literature, however, emerged as her principal interest and would provide a model for her future career.y

White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, long before it was completed The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although the critical response was not as close to unanimously positive as it had been to White Teeth.

The second novel was followed by another, On Beauty, published in September 2005 and which is set largely in and around Greater Boston and which attracted more acclaim. This third novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.

On Beauty The book is loosely based on Howards End by E. M. Forster, and has been described by Zadie Smith as a 'homage' to Forster's novel At the most basic level, On Beauty is the story of a husband and wife as they struggle to cope with the repercussions of marital infidelity and the subsequent breakdown of their otherwise close-knit family.  The book actually focuses on two families, the Belseys and the Kippses, although the Kippses play a much smaller part. The make-up of these two families is almost identical.  The two husbands are both around the same age, both English, and both art history professors and Rembrandt scholars. 

The children of these two marriages are also around the same age, and each of their only daughters end up attending the same college (which is also the same college where both their fathers hold faculty positions but, believe me, it hasn't even begun to get complicated yet).  

The Belsey family has always defined itself as liberal and atheist, and Howard in particular is furious when son Jerome, a newly born-again Christian, goes to work as an intern with the ultra-conservative Christian Kipps family over his summer holidays. After a failed affair with Victoria Kipps, Jerome returns home. The families are brought into proximity again nine months later when the Kippses move to Wellington, and Monty begins work at the university.

Zora and Levi both become friends with Carl, an African-American man of a poorer background than their own middle-class lifestyle. Zora uses him as a posterchild for her campaign to allow talented non-students in university classes. For Levi, Carl is a source of identity, as a member of a more 'authentic' black culture than Levi considers his own background to be.

Carlene and Kiki become friends despite the tensions between their families. Rivalry between Monty and Howard increases as Monty challenges the liberal attitudes of the university on issues such as affirmative action. His academic success also highlights Howard's inadequacies and failure to publish a long-awaited book. Meanwhile the Belsey family is facing problems of its own, as they deal with the fallout of Howard's affair with his colleague and family friend Claire.

NW takes its title from the NW postcode area in North-West London, the setting of the novel. The novel is experimental and follows four different characters living in London, shifting between first and third person, stream-of-consciousness, screenplay-style dialogue and other narrative techniques in an attempt to reflect the polyphonic nature of contemporary urban life

Swing Time (2016) - Beginning in 2008, the novel tells the story of two mixed-race, black and white, girls who meet in 1982 in a tap class in London.

Major works : Speaking with the Angel   (contributor)   Penguin, 2000 White Teeth   Hamish Hamilton, 2000 Piece of Flesh   (editor)   Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2001 The May Anthologies   (editor)   Varsity Publications, 2001 The Autograph Man   Hamish Hamilton, 2002 Best of Young British Novelists 2003   (includes short story 'Martha, Martha' by Zadie Smith)   Granta, 2003 The Burned Children of America   (introduction)   Hamish Hamilton, 2003 On Beauty   Hamish Hamilton, 2005 Fail Better: The Morality of the Novel   Hamish Hamilton, 2006 The Book of Other People   (editor)   Hamish Hamilton, 2007