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Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith was still a student at Cambridge when the unfinished manuscript of her first novel sparked a bidding war between publishers. She soared to stardom when White Teeth was released in 2000. Her following novels The Autograph Man, On Beauty and NW brought her further critical acclaim.

From the archive

  • Zadie Smith discusses her debut novel with James Naughtie on Radio 4 in 2005. She tackles readers' questions on whether she set out to portray a "happy multicultural land", if she intended to "expose fundamentalism for what it really is", and how her writing captures the "thoughts of a middle aged man".

  • Zadie Smith talks to Mariella Frostrup in September 2012 ahead of the release of NW. The novel returns to the same streets of her debut White Teeth, and takes its title from the postcode which covers the North West of London, where Smith herself was born and brought up.

  • Smith joins Stephanie Flanders On Start the Week in June 2013 to talk about her book NW and issues surrounding social mobility. The novel paints a portrait of modern urban life in which characters try, but mostly fail, to escape their past.

  • Smith's Desert Island Discs selections in September 2013 include Wagner, Mozart, Prince and Madonna. She also chose the Notorious B.I.G song Mo Money, Mo Problems which she says captured an "enormous feeling of optimism” for black Americans in the 1990s during the Clinton era.

  • Smith discusses her story The Embassy of Cambodia on Radio 4's Front Row in November 2013. She talks to Mark Lawson about her evolving relationship with short stories, and the inspiration she takes from her home neighbourhood of Willesden in London.

Zadie Smith (Getty)

About the author

Zadie Smith burst on to the literary scene in 2000 with her dazzling debut White Teeth. This bold, compelling portrait of contemporary London is told through the stories of three families, one Indian, one white and one mixed-race.

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It looks back to World War Two and forward to the present, and captures the city’s racial and cultural make-up. When White Teeth came out the critics heralded the 25-year-old as a new modern voice and chronicler of multicultural Britain.

White Teeth won Smith a plethora of awards including, The Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Prize for a first novel, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award. The novel was adapted for television in 2002.

Smith has published three more novels, all of which explore modern day cultural questions surrounding class and ethnicity. In her 2002 book The Autograph Man Chinese-Jewish Alex-Li Tandem is a dealer in autographs who is in thrall to celebrities.

On Beauty followed in 2005, and is about the lives of a British-American family as they become intertwined with those of a Trinidadian family with the story spanning both sides of the Atlantic. It won both the Somerset Maugham Award and also the Orange Prize fiction in 2006.

Smith’s next book was 2012’s experimental NW, which she has described as her favourite. Like much of her fiction it is set in North West London where she grew up and tells the stories of Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan, who spent their childhoods on the same council estate. Now in their thirties their lives have taken them on different paths and Smith renders their disconnected experiences with humanity.

Zadie Smith has edited several short story collections and is the author of the essay collections Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, and Fail Better: The Morality of the Novel. Zadie Smith was on the list of Granta’s best young novelists in 2003 and 2013.

Simon Richardson, ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Readings Unit

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