Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5064608.stm




Third time lucky - Zadie Smith has won the Orange Prize for fiction. Her first two books made the shortlist but didn't win. This year On Beauty pipped the other shortlisted books to the post after the judges reached an impasse and their chairwoman accepted a majority vote.



Sadie Smith changed her name to Zadie in her mid-teens to make herself sound more exotic and has always had a flair for making herself stand out from the crowd.

At school she says he felt like a freak but she didn't try to melt into the background by dressing like everyone else. She used to wear odd shoes "one red, one white".

"Literature was a way of avoiding unpleasantness at school, particularly being at a big comprehensive."

White Teeth was the focus of a bidding war before it was completed

Born in 1975 to a Jamaican mother and white father, Zadie Smith grew up in Brent in north London.

She used her early life and her parents as inspiration for her first novel, White Teeth but she has said that despite the similarities with her background, there are many differences between the characters and reality.

Zadie Smith's love of literature took her from state schools to Cambridge University, where she gained a first in English. Her writing became known when she was a student, when she had a couple of short stories published in a collection of student writing.

'Just another prize'

Impressed by her talent, a publisher offered her a contract for a novel, but Smith took the advice of a fellow student and was taken on by a literary agency.

She wrote White Teeth while still at Cambridge and it became the focus of a bidding war before it was even completed. She signed a book deal rumoured to be worth £250,000.

The novel became an immediate bestseller and won several prizes, including The Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award.

But not the Orange Prize, for which she was only shortlisted. At that time she called it "just another prize" and suggested that one of the judges could "kiss my behind".

Chairwoman of Orange Prize judges, Martha Kearney

White Teeth has been translated into more than twenty languages and was made into a television drama by Channel 4.

The ballyhoo surrounding it made the reading public keen for her follow-up novel but Smith herself said it gave her a difficult period with writer's block.

Eventually, she produced the Autograph Man, the story of a half-Jewish young man, obsessed by an actress and trying to deal in the signatures of the famous.

It told a tale of loss, obsession and the nature of celebrity and won the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction.

But not the Orange Prize, for which she was again shortlisted.

Film deal

As well as writing novels, Smith has been Writer in Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and has published an anthology of erotic stories, called Piece of Flesh.

She wrote the introduction for a collection of short stories by young American writers, The Burned Children of America. She has also turned her hand to non-fiction with Fail Better, about writing.

Her third novel, is a modern reworking of Howard's End, E.M. Forster's novel.

On Beauty divided the Orange Prize's judges but their Chair, Martha Kearney, described it as "a literary tour de force" that "combines extraordinary characterisation with skilful and seemingly effortless plotting".

Zadie Smith has suffered from writer's block

After receiving the Orange Prize, Zadie Smith said: "I'm delighted that it happened... I'm elated, I really am." She said she was honoured even to have been shortlisted with such an impressive list of fellow writers.

The prize carries with it a cheque for £30,000 but larger sums of money are involved in the film of the book. The rights have been bought by FilmFour and a budget of £20m has been set aside for making the movie.

Smith says she has no immediate plans for a new book, saying "the pipe is dry", which will disappoint her many fans around the world. But she is said to be writing with her husband, Nick Laird, who is a novelist and a prize-winning poet whom she met at university.

Smith is never one to do the expected, and their project is rumoured to be a musical based on the life of Franz Kafka.

We will just have to see whether the rumours prove to be true and if so, whether this extraordinary talent will garner even more glittering prizes.