These attracted the attention of a publisher, who offered her a contract for her first novel. While an undergrad, she published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called The Mays Anthology. Despite those earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest. Smith attended Cambridge University where she earned money as a jazz singer and, at first, wanted to become a journalist. When she was 14, she changed her name to "Zadie." Her parents divorced when she was a teenager.Īs a child Smith was fond of tap dancing and as a teenager considered a musical theater career. Zadie 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.
Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and emigrated to Britain in 1969. Zadie Smith was born as Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent-a largely working-class area-to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and a British father, Harvey Smith. Currently-lives in New York City, New York, and London, England.
Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation.Ī second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.Īt the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis.
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