Zadie Smith is the award-winning author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as collections of essays such as Changing My Mind and Feel Free. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002 and listed as one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and 2013, and is a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother and graduated from Cambridge in 1997, Smith wrote a short and timely series of reflective essays, Intimations, during the early months of lockdown. “Smith does more than illuminate what we’re going through,” according to John Powers of NPR’s Fresh Air. “She teaches us how to be better at being human.”