Zadie Smith FRSL (born Sadie; 25 October 1975) is an English[1] novelist, essayist, and short-story writer.

As a child, Smith was fond of tap dancing,[3] and in her teenage years, she considered a career in musical theatre.

[13] At Cambridge, Smith published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called The Mays Anthology.

[3] In July 2000, Smith's debut work was discussed in a controversial essay of literary criticism by James Wood entitled "Human, All Too Inhuman", where Wood critiques the novel as part of a contemporary genre of hysterical realism where "'[i]nformation has become the new character" and human feeling is absent from contemporary fiction.

[16] In an article for The Guardian in October 2001, Smith responded to the criticism by agreeing with the accuracy of the term and with Wood's underlying argument that "any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped".

[17] However, she rejected her debut being categorised alongside major authors such as David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, and Don DeLillo, and the dismissal of their own innovations on the basis of being "hysterical realism".

[17] Responding earnestly to Wood's concerns about contemporary literature and culture, Smith described her own anxieties as a writer and argued that fiction should be "not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both".

[17] Smith served as writer-in-residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London and subsequently published, as editor, an anthology of sex writing, Piece of Flesh, as the culmination of this role.

Smith's second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although it was not as well received by critics as White Teeth.

After the publication of The Autograph Man, Smith visited the United States as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

[30] NW was made into a BBC television film with the same title, directed by Saul Dibb and adapted by Rachel Bennette.

[33][34] In September 2013, Smith appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs,[35] with her book choice being Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

[36] In 2015, it was announced that Smith, along with her husband Nick Laird, was writing the screenplay for a science fiction movie to be directed by French filmmaker Claire Denis.

In 2020 she published six essays in a collection entitled Intimations, the royalties from which she said she would be donating to the Equal Justice Initiative and New York’s COVID-19 emergency relief fund.

[43] The retelling replaces the pilgrimage with a pub crawl set in contemporary London, with the Wife of Bath becoming Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman in her mid-50s who challenges her Auntie P's traditional Christian views on sex and marriage.

To her, Alvita's voice is a common one that she heard growing up in Brent, and thus writing this play was a natural choice for the festival.

The tale itself is set in 17th-century Jamaica, where a man guilty of rape is brought before the Queen, who decrees that his punishment is to go and find what women truly desire.

"[50] According to Karan Mahajan, writing in The New York Times, "It offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

[52] Burrow shows how "Smith gives a fresh angle to this often-told tale [Tichborne case] by concentrating on a key witness in the trials: Andrew Bogle, a Black man who grew up enslaved in Jamaica.

There he became the page of Edward Tichborne...who was the manager of the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos's plantations around Kingston....Bogle himself remains the central enigma of the novel....Blowing a hole in earlier literature while feeling its weight is perhaps the main aim of The Fraud.