Zadie Smith

Timeline
• Born "Sadie Smith" in North London on October 25, 1975.
• Studied English at Cambridge and graduated in 1997.
• In 2000, she won two Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards (EMMA's) for White Teeth
• In 2001, she won Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book) for White Teeth
• In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors
• In 2003, she was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
• Married Nick Laird in 2004.
• In 2009 her daughter Katherine was born.
• She taught at Columbia and is currently a professor at NYU.

Bibliography
• White Teeth 2000
• Piece of Flesh (editor) 2001
• The May Anthologies (editor) 2001
• The Autograph Man 2002
• Hanwell in Hell (The New Yorker) 2004.
• On Beauty 2005
• Hanwell Sr. (The New Yorker) 2007.

Themes & Subjects
• Ethnically diverse families
• Feminism
• Humor
• Identity
• Immigration
• Racism
• Religion
• Sexuality

Quotes
"Generally, an English Lit degree trains you to be a useless member of the modern world and that's what I'm being in the only way I know how."

"I went to University to study English Literature. I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy. The best, the only real training you can get is from reading other people's books."

“I think [list making] is a slightly depressing English habit. We’d much rather have somebody else’s taste to follow rather than having to take any time finding something new; discovering new writers or going to a bookshop without instruction. It is depressing.”

"Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out."- On Beauty

"If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made."- White Teeth

Links

Zadie Smith Reads from On Beauty http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdZcnvLCVec

The TV Movie Version of White Teeth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqyULdCQr-o&feature=related

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadie_Smith