Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith was born in 1975 and grew up in London. She studied English at King's College, Cambridge between 1994 and 1997, during which time she published short stories in and began working on her first novel, White Teeth. Smith has published three novels to date: White Teeth in 2000, The Autograph Man in 2002 and On Beauty in 2005, which won the Orange prize for fiction in 2006.
Unlike most of the other authors represented in the Cambridge Authors project, Smith is a contemporary writer in some ways still at the beginning of her career as a novelist and critic. She is also a writer whose works reflect her position in a modern, urban community, as well as in an intellectual and literary culture defined by the great English writers of the past (one of whom, E. M. Forster, is another of our Cambridge Authors). The essays and resources - including an interview - available here reflect these emphases.