Becca Anderson, author of The Book of Awesome Women Writers, has written a new blog post on the life and career of author Zadie Smith.
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Born Sadie Smith in 1975 to a Jamaican mother and an English father, at age fourteen, she changed her name to Zadie. An early interest in jazz singing gave way to the pursuit of a career in writing. While studying English literature at King’s College, her short stories attracted the attention of a publisher, and her professional career was assured even before she graduated. Her first novel, White Teeth (2000), became an immediate bestseller. Since then, she has been a prolific writer of novels, short fiction, and essays. Her novels include The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), NW (2012), Swing Time (2016), and The Fraud (2019); and in 2019, she also published a short fiction collection, Grand Union: Stories.
In 2002, Smith was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Among her many accolades, her debut novel White Teeth received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Guardian First Book Award; her second book, On Beauty, won the Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2017, she was awarded the Langston Hughes Medal by the City College of New York. Since 2010, Zadie Smith has been a tenured professor in the creative writing department at New York University.
The Book of awesome women writers
Medieval Mystics, Pioneering Poets, Fierce Feminists and First Ladies of Literature (Feminist Book, Gift for Women, Gift for Writers)
This one-of-a-kind tome takes a tour with Sylvia Beach and other booksellers as well as librarians, editors, writers, bibliophiles, and celebrated book clubs. Join women’s studies scholar Anders as she takes you on a ribald ride through the pages of history. Chapter titles include “Prolific Pens” (including Joyce Carol Oates, author of over 100 books), “Mystics, Memoirists and Madwomen”, “Salons and Neosalons”, “Ink in Their Veins” (literary dynasties), and the titillating “Banned, Blacklisted, and Arrested.”