White Teeth (2000)
Debut: the intertwined Jones, Iqbal and Chalfen families in Willesden; won the Whitbread First Novel Award
Literature · Novelists
Zadie Smith
born 1975 · British
Contemporary literary fiction; multicultural London novel
Zadie Smith burst onto the scene in 2000 with White Teeth, a comic, sprawling novel of multicultural north-west London written while she was still a Cambridge student. She won the Orange Prize for On Beauty, has written acclaimed essays for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and in The Fraud (2023) turned to historical fiction about the Tichborne claimant case.
How to spot them
- ▸Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, wartime friends in Willesden (White Teeth)
- ▸North-west London, especially Willesden and the borough of Brent
- ▸On Beauty, an homage to E. M. Forster's Howards End
- ▸The Tichborne claimant and novelist William Harrison Ainsworth (The Fraud)
- ▸Chaucer's Wife of Bath relocated to a Kilburn pub (The Wife of Willesden)
Key works
The Autograph Man (2002)
Alex-Li Tandem, a Jewish-Chinese autograph dealer from north London, hunts a reclusive film star's signature
On Beauty (2005)
Orange Prize winner: two rival academic families in a New England college town, modelled on Howards End
NW (2012)
Four former Kilburn council-estate residents' lives in north-west London
Swing Time (2016)
Two mixed-race girls who meet at a dance class; one becomes assistant to a global pop star
The Wife of Willesden (2021)
Play adapting Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, staged at the Kiln Theatre, Kilburn
The Fraud (2023)
Historical novel about Eliza Touchet, housekeeper to William Harrison Ainsworth, and the Tichborne case
Key ideas
- Comic, polyphonic portraits of multicultural Britain and questions of identity, race and class
- Essay collections include Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018), Intimations (2020) and Dead and Alive (2025)
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Willesden, north-west London, in 1975, to an English father and Jamaican mother
- •Changed the spelling of her first name from Sadie to Zadie as a teenager
- •Studied English at King's College, Cambridge
- •White Teeth also won the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
- •On Beauty was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (2005) and won the Orange Prize for Fiction (2006)
- •Twice named in Granta's list of Best of Young British Novelists (2003 and 2013)
- •A professor of creative writing at New York University; married to the poet and novelist Nick Laird
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Women's Prize for Fiction — Zadie Smith
- Penguin Random House — Dead and Alive