
Smith began writing stories at the age of six, but it was dance, not literature, that inspired her as a child. Her parents, a photographer and a child psychologist, divorced when she was 15 years old, and she has two younger brothers as well as an older half brother and sister.


Born Sadie Smith in Willesden area of North London on October 27, 1975, to a British father and a Jamaican mother, Smith changed her name to "Zadie" when she was a child, because it seemed more exotic.
