While an undergrad, she published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called The Mays Anthology. Despite those earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest.

Smith attended Cambridge University where she earned money as a jazz singer and, at first, wanted to become a journalist. When she was 14, she changed her name to 'Zadie.'

Her parents divorced when she was a teenager.Īs a child Smith was fond of tap dancing and as a teenager considered a musical theater career. Zadie has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown and the other is rapper Luc Skyz.

Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and emigrated to Britain in 1969. Zadie Smith was born as Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent-a largely working-class area-to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and a British father, Harvey Smith.

Currently-lives in New York City, New York, and London, England.

Moving from northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.ĭazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, about what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. Two brown girls dream of being dancers-but only one, Tracey, has talent. But while Tracey possesses a pink Barbie car bed, feet like “two hummingbirds in flight,” and a virtuoso instinct for provocation, the unnamed narrator has an austerely beautiful, Jamaica-born intellectual mother who disdains frivolity: “Doesn’t matter if you’ve got flat feet, doesn’t matter, because you’re clever and you know where you came from and where you’re going.An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from northwest London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty. It’s 1982, and a pair of 7-year-old girls from neighboring housing estates meet in dance class in northwest London (where Smith was raised and now lives with her family part of the year): “Our shade of brown was exactly the same-as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both.” They bond over Top Hat and Thriller they make up dance routines and stories. Building upon the promise of White Teeth, written 16 years ago, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (Penguin Press) boldly reimagines the classically English preoccupation with class and status for a new era-in which race, gender, and the strange distortions of contemporary celebrity meet on a global stage.

Every once in a while, a novel reminds us of why we still need them.

Swing time novel