Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith (2011)

Zadie Smith (born October 25, 1975 in Willesden, London ) is a British writer and university lecturer .

Life

Childhood & adolescence

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Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith (she changed her name at the age of 14) in 1975 in a working-class neighborhood in north-west London. Her mother Yvonne Bailey came from Jamaica and came to England in 1969, her father Harvey Smith was a white Englishman. Zadie Smith has a half sister, a half brother, and two younger brothers. One of them is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown. Her parents separated when she was a teenager. During her studies, she made a living as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist.

Studies & career

After attending Malorees State Junior School, Zadie Smith enrolled at King's College , Cambridge University in English Literature . While studying, she published a series of short stories in a student publication called May Anthologies. A publisher recognized her talent and offered a contract for her debut. Zadie Smith contacted an agency and received a contract and an unusually large advance, called £ 250,000, on the basis of little more than an initial chapter.

White Teeth appeared on the publishing market in 1997, well before completion. The rights went to Hamish Hamilton publishing house after an auction. Smith completed White Teeth during her senior year. Shortly after its publication in 2000, the book became a bestseller. It has received international acclaim and a number of awards. It has now been translated into over twenty languages.

In interviews, she complained that the hype surrounding her debut had given her temporary writer's block. Regardless of this, her second novel The Autograph Man appeared in 2002 and was a success. However, the voices of the critics were more cautious compared to the debut.

After publishing The Autograph Man , Smith visited the United States as a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study ( Harvard University ). She began work on a collection of essays, The Morality of the Novel, in which she viewed a number of selected writers of the 20th century through the prism of moral philosophy.

Her third novel, On Beauty , was published in September 2005 and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize . The book was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction 2006 .

After a long period in which Smith mainly published essays, her fourth novel NW was published in autumn 2012 , the story of which is set in London's Willesden district, where Smith was born in 1975. Her fifth novel, Swing TIme , was published two years later , the story of a girl friendship and a shared love for dance that transcends gender, class and even time. In October 2019, Smith's first collection of short stories appeared with Grand Union .

After teaching literature at Columbia University and Harvard University , she was appointed professor of creative writing at New York University in 2010 . In 2017 she was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

2019 Smith was included in the anthology New Daughters of Africa by Margaret Busby added.

Private life

Zadie Smith has been married to the writer Nick Laird since 2004 . The couple have two children and live in New York and London.

Works

Novels

stories

  • Mirrored box. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories. 1995.
  • The Newspaper Man. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories. 1996.
  • Mrs. Begum's Son and the Private Tutor. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories. 1997.
  • Picnic, Lightning. In: The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories. 1997.
  • Stuart. In: The New Yorker. December 27, 1999.
  • I'm the only one. In: Speaking with the Angel . Ed. Nick Hornby 2000.
  • The Girl with Bangs. In: Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. Issue 6, 2001.
  • The Wrestling Match. In: The New Yorker. June 17, 2002.
  • The Trials of Finch. In: The New Yorker. December 13, 2002.
  • Martha, Martha. In: Granta 81: Best of Young British Novelists. 2003.
  • Hanwell in Hell. In: The New Yorker. September 27, 2004.
  • Martha and Hanwell. 2005, anthology. Contains the two short stories Martha, Martha (2003) and Hanwell in Hell (2004).
  • Hanwell Sr. In: The New Yorker, May 14, 2007.
  • Permission to Enter. In: The New Yorker, July 30, 2012.
  • The Embassy of Cambodia. In: The New Yorker, February 11, 2013.
    • The Embassy of Cambodia. Bilingual, German by Tanja Handels. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2014, ISBN 978-3-462-04685-4 .
  • Meet the President! In: The New Yorker. 5th August 2013.
  • Moonlit Landsacpe with Bridge. In: The New Yorker. February 10, 2014.
  • The Big Week. In: Paris Review . Summer 2014
  • Escape from New York. In: The New Yorker. June 8, 2015.
  • Two Men Arrive in a Village. In: The New Yorker. June 6, 2016.
  • The lazy river. In: The New Yorker. December 11, 2017.
  • No More Than Ever. In: The New Yorker. 23rd July 2018.
  • Grand Union. Stories. 2019, anthology. Contains 19 short stories, 11 of them previously unpublished.

Non-fiction

  • On the Road: American Writers and Their Hair. Essay, in: Timothy McSweeney's Festival of Literature, Theater, and Music. 2001.
  • We Proceed in Iraq as Hypocrites and Cowards - and the World Knows It. Article on the Iraq War, in: The Guardian. February 27, 2003.
  • The Divine Ms H. Essay on Katharine Hepburn , in: The Guardian. July 1, 2003.
  • The Limited Circle is Pure. Essay on Franz Kafka , in: The New Republic. November 3, 2003, on the occasion of a new edition of Kafka's The Trial , for which Smith also wrote a preface.
  • Love, actually. Essay on EM Forster , in: The Guardian. November 1, 2003.
  • You are in paradise. Essay on vacation, in: The New Yorker. June 14, 2004.
  • Shades of Greene. Introduction to a new edition of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American , in: The Guardian. September 18, 2004.
  • The Zen of Eminem. Essay on Eminem , in: VIBE. 2005.
  • We are family. Interview with her brother, rapper Doc Brown, in: The Guardian. March 4, 2005.
  • Nature's Work of Art. Essay on Greta Garbo , in: The Guardian. September 15, 2005.
  • Fail Better. Essay on Writing, in: The Guardian. January 13, 2007.
  • What Does Soulful Mean? Essay on Zora Neale Hurston's novel And Her Eyes Saw God , in: The Guardian. September 1, 2007.
  • F. Kafka, Everyman. Review of Louis Begley's book The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head. Franz Kafka. A Biographical Essay. in: The New York Review of Books. July 17, 2008.
  • Dead Man Laughing. Essay on Humor in Her Family, in: The New Yorker. December 22nd and 29th, 2008.
  • Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. Collection of essays on writing, 2009.
    • Change of mind. Casual essays. German by Tanja Handels. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-462-04658-8 .
  • An essay is an act of imagination. It still takes Quite as Much Art as Fiction. Essay on the novel, in: The Guardian. November 21, 2009.
  • Generation Why? Review of the film The Social Network and the book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier , in: The New York Review of Books. November 25, 2010.
  • Killing Orson Welles at Midnight. Review of Christian Marclay's 24-hour film project The Clock , in: The New York Review of Books. April 28, 2011.
  • Monsters. Essay on 9/11 , ten years later, in: The New Yorker. September 12, 2011.
  • The North West London Blues. Essay on urban decay, in: The New York Review of Books. June 2, 2012.
  • Love in the Gardens. Essay on Gardens, in: The New York Review of Books. November 7, 2013.
  • Man vs. Corpse. Essay on Karl Ove Knausgård and Italian painting, in: The New York Review of Books. 5th December 2013.
  • Elegy for a Country's Seasons. Essay on the English hinterland, in: The New York Review of Books. 3rd April 2014.
  • On "Crash". Essay on JG Ballard , in: The New York Review of Books. July 10, 2014.
  • Find your beach. Essay on Manhattan , in: The New York Review of Books. 23 October 2014.
  • Windows on the Will. Essay on Schopenhauer and the films The Polar Express and Anomalisa , in: The New York Review of Books. March 10, 2016.
  • Fences. A Brexit Diary. Essay on Brexit , in: The New York Review of Books. 18th August 2016.
  • On Optimism and Despair. Speech on the presentation of the WELT Literature Prize 2016, in: The New York Review of Books. December 22, 2016.
  • Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's Imaginary Portraits. Essay on the British-Ghanaian artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye , in: The New Yorker. 19th June 2017.
  • Feel Free: Essays. Hamish Hamilton, 2018.
  • The American Exception. Commentary on America and Trump in the corona crisis , in: The New Yorker. April 10, 2020.

As editor

  • Piece of Flesh. 2001.
  • The Book of Other People. 2007.

Prizes and awards

For white teeth:

For The Autograph Man:

For On Beauty:

For swing time:

For Feel Free (essays):

For the complete works:

literature

  • Ingrid Jacobs: “Past Tense, Future Perfect”? - The root canals of history with humor in Zadie Smith's White Teeth. In: Manuel Aßner, Jessica Breidbach et al. (Eds.): AfrikaBilder im Wandel? Sources, continuities, effects and breaks. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-631-61568-3 .
  • Zadie Smith: The I that I am not. "Philip Roth Lecture" in the New York Public Library , published in Feel Free in 2018 . Essays, in German by Tanja Handels, Deutschlandfunk , 2019.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Aida Edemariam: Learning curve. In: TheGuardian.com . September 3, 2005, accessed March 27, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b Zadie Smith. In: Literature.BritishCouncil.org. Retrieved March 27, 2020 .
  3. ↑ See White Teeth by Zadie Smith. In: TheGuardian.com. January 26, 2000, accessed March 27, 2020 . See also the entry in
    Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . Stuttgart and Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 540.
  4. ^ Ishan Taylor: Paperback Row. In: NYTimes.com. September 17, 2006, accessed March 27, 2020 .
  5. ^ Joyce Carol Oates: Cards of Identity. In: NYBooks.com. September 27, 2012, accessed March 27, 2020 .
  6. ^ A b Sandra Kegel : "Swing Time" by Zadie Smith. She gave him sex - he gave her class. In: FAZ.net . August 18, 2017, accessed March 27, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Member: Zadie Smith. In: ArtsAndLetters.org. American Academy of Arts and Letters , accessed March 27, 2020 .
  8. ^ Claire Armitstead: 'Identity is a pain in the ass': Zadie Smith on political correctness. In: TheGuardian.com. February 2, 2019, accessed March 27, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Bred to life in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on December 23, 2012, page 24.
  10. ↑ Martina Sulner: End of the line longing. ( Memento from September 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). Review in the Oberhessische Presse on January 6, 2014.
  11. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Zadie Smith: London NW. Your confession is pure selfishness, Natalie. In: FAZ.net. January 10, 2014, accessed March 27, 2020 .
  12. ^ State Prize for European Literature goes to Zadie Smith. In: ORF.at . July 3, 2018, accessed March 27, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Smith, Zadie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Smith, Sadie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1975
PLACE OF BIRTH London , England