Zadie Smith

Smith grew up in Willesden, northwest London, the daughter of an English father and a Jamaican mother, and changed her name from Sadie to Zadie at fourteen. She wrote much of White Teeth while still an undergraduate at Cambridge, and publishers bid a six-figure advance on an unfinished manuscript before she had even sat her final exams: a debut that arrived, in 2000, trailing more hype than any first novel in a generation, and mostly justified it.

She followed it with The Autograph Man, On Beauty (which won the Orange Prize and reworked E. M. Forster's Howards End), NW, and Swing Time, alongside widely read essay collections on culture, race, and writing itself. She has taught creative writing at New York University since 2010, splitting her time between London and New York.