Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith on October 27, 1975 in the Willesden area of north London, the daughter of a British father and a Jamaican mother. Willesden would become the setting of her first novel, White Teeth (2000), and the novel’s main character, Irie, would also be the daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father. Smith changed her name to the more exotic Zadie as a child. Smith’s early interests were in the performing arts; she was a tap dancer until the age of fifteen. She was also an ardent fan of old Hollywood musical films and actress Katharine Hepburn, knowledge she would draw on in writing her second novel, The Autograph Man (2002). For a time she earned money as a jazz singer; both of her younger brothers are rap singers in Great Britain. Smith attended Hampstead Comprehensive School until the age of eighteen and King’s College, Cambridge University, from 1994 to 1997, graduating with a degree in English literature.

While at Cambridge, Smith published short stories in the May Anthologies, the annual collection of work by students at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Her work attracted the attention of the publishing world, and while still a university student she was offered an advance of £250,000, or approximately $400,000, for her first two books. The size of the advance for such a young, unknown writer put her name in the news even before her first book was published.

White Teeth, Smith’s first novel, was published in January, 2000, when the writer was only twenty-four years old. The book, a saga of three families in multicultural north London, was an immediate best seller, and Smith became a literary celebrity. As a clever and inventive writer and a young and attractive woman of mixed race at the turn of a new century, Smith became a symbol of a new multiethnic strain of British writing. White Teeth won a host of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award, and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, all in 2000. White Teeth was adapted for British Broadcasting Corporation television, broadcast in 2002, and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Smith was writer-in-residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London from 2000 to 2001 while writing her second novel, The Autograph Man, which appeared in 2002. This novel, which was narrower in scope but deeper in character development than White Teeth, was not as well received, more than likely because it was impossible to live up to the media attention that had attended the first novel. Set in London and New York, the novel’s main character is a Chinese-Jewish autograph collector. One of the themes of the novel is an exploration of the nature of fame and celebrity, possibly in reaction to Smith’s experience after the publication of White Teeth. The Autograph Man won the Jewish Quarterly Review’s Wingate Literary Prize in 2003. Also in 2003, Smith was included in Granta magazine’s list of Twenty Best Young British Novelists.

In 2002 and 2003, Smith lived in the United States, teaching, studying, and writing as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. While there, she began work on a collection of literary essays.

Smith’s third novel, On Beauty , was published in 2005. Set in London and on the campus of a fictional American university, the novel depicts the disintegration of the marriage of Howard Belsey, a liberal white art history professor married to a vibrant African American woman, and his collision with his...