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She was born Sadie Smith in the north-west London borough of Brent to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith.
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At Cambridge, Smith published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called The Mays Anthology. They attracted the attention of a publisher, who offered her a contract for her first novel. Smith decided to contact a literary agent and was taken on by A. P. Watt
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Published in 2000, the novel immediately became a best-seller. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. The novel was adapted for television in 2002
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Smith's third novel, On Beauty, was published in September 2005. It is set largely in and around Greater Boston. It attracted more acclaim than The Autograph Man: it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize,[17] and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
