Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith in North London in 1975, the daughter of a working-class English father and Jamaican mother. At age fourteen, she changed the first initial of her first name to “Z,” purportedly to draw attention to her individuality. Smith attended King’s College, Cambridge, where she studied English literature. While a student, she began a manuscript for the novel that would become White Teeth; and in a fairy-tale experience, found a literary agent after submitting little more than a single chapter. White Teeth created quite the anticipatory buzz, and Smith published the novel in 2000 to instant acclaim. White Teeth received The Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). Her tenure as Writer in Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts resulted in the publication of an anthology of erotic stories entitled Piece of Flesh (2001). More recently, she has written the introduction for The Burned Children of America (2003), a collection of eighteen short stories by a new generation of young American writers. In 2013, Zadie Smith’s short story, The Embassy of Cambodia was published in the United Kingdom as a stand-alone story in book form, selling in excess of 40,000 copies in the first year of publication.
Zadie Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), a story of loss, obsession and the nature of celebrity, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. In 2003 and 2013 she was named by Granta magazine as one of 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. Her third novel, On Beauty, was published in 2005, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also written a nonfiction book about writing entitled Fail Better (2006). Her book, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, came out in 2009. Her novel, NW (2012) was named as one of the New York Times ‘10 Best Books of 2012.’ She is working on a book of essays entitled Feel Free to be published in September 2015.

Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of Creative Writing at New York University.
30. Amrit Wilson is a writer and activist on issues of race and gender in Britain and South Asian politics. She is a founder member of South Asia Solidarity Group and the Freedom Without Fear Platform, and board member of Imkaan, a Black, South Asian and minority ethnic women’s organisation dedicated to combating violence against women in Britain. She was a founder member of Awaz and an active member of OWAAD