Zadie Smith, the novelist who has never reread White Teeth, the debut that made her famous

Zadie Smith

Photo: David Shankbone / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 25, 1975 London
Occupation	Writer
Awards	James Tait Black Memorial Prize · Costa Book Awards · Women's Prize for Fiction

Zadie Smith has never reread White Teeth. She admitted as much on the stage of the Royal Festival Hall, at London’s Southbank Centre, to a sold-out house and an interviewer more used to filling arenas: Dua Lipa, who is curating the London Literature Festival through her own book club and chose the novel that made Smith famous as the subject of their conversation. The confession drew a laugh, and it neatly describes a career spent walking away from its own first triumph.

That triumph came absurdly early. Smith wrote most of White Teeth as an undergraduate reading English at King’s College, Cambridge, and the rights were auctioned on the strength of a partial manuscript, won by the publisher Hamish Hamilton before she had finished it. The finished book, a crowded comic saga of two families in Willesden, the corner of north-west London where she grew up, made a student the most discussed debut novelist in Britain. The critic James Wood then used it to define what he called “hysterical realism”, fiction so crammed with information that feeling gets squeezed out. Smith answered him in print and conceded he had a point.

She was born Sadie Smith on 25 October 1975 in Willesden, to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith, three decades older than his wife. At 14 she swapped one letter of her first name for another. Tap dancing was the passion of her childhood, and at university she paid her way singing jazz; one of her younger brothers is the rapper and comedian Doc Brown. Stories she placed in The Mays, the Cambridge anthology of student writing, caught a publisher’s eye.

White Teeth appeared in 2000 and gathered prizes at a speed few first novels match, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize among them. Channel 4 adapted it for television in 2002, and Time later named it among the best English-language novels since 1923. The Autograph Man, also from 2002, sold well and won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize, but reviewers were cooler, and Smith went to Harvard as a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute to think about the novel as a moral form.

What came out of that American stretch was On Beauty (2005), a campus novel set around Greater Boston that borrows the frame of E. M. Forster’s Howards End and sets two academic families, one liberal and one conservative, against each other over a painting and their children’s love affairs. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006. The dedication reads “my dear Laird”: the Northern Irish poet Nick Laird, whom she met at Cambridge and married in 2004 in King’s College Chapel. They have two children.

Then she went home. NW (2012) takes its title from the postcode of Kilburn and follows four people who grew up on the same council estate, in prose that splinters whenever their lives do. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and in 2016 the BBC turned it into a television film, starring Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox. A year after NW came The Embassy of Cambodia, a long story set in Willesden. Swing Time (2016) finally put the tap shoes into a book: two mixed-race girls from a London estate who dream of dancing, only one of whom has the talent. It was longlisted for the Booker in 2017.

By then Smith was as much a critic as a novelist. She has taught fiction at New York University as a tenured professor since 2010, and her collections Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009) and Feel Free (2018) move from Kafka to Joni Mitchell and Justin Bieber with equal attention; Feel Free won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Grand Union (2019) was her first collection of short stories. Intimations (2020), six essays from the first months of the pandemic, gave its royalties to charity.

The surprise of the decade was the stage. Brent, her home borough, was named London Borough of Culture for 2020, and Smith answered with The Wife of Willesden, her first play, a version of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath relocated to a London pub. The pilgrim becomes Alvita, a Jamaican-born woman in her fifties with five husbands behind her and no apology for any of them. It opened at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn in 2021, and the Critics’ Circle named Smith the most promising playwright of the year, a fine joke to play on a writer two decades into her career.

The Fraud (2023) was another swerve, her first historical novel. It reopens the Tichborne case, the Victorian scandal over an Australian butcher who claimed to be the lost heir to a baronetcy, and tells it through two witnesses history mostly ignored: Eliza Touchet, housekeeper to the forgotten best-selling novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, and Andrew Bogle, who grew up enslaved on a Jamaican plantation and testified for the claimant. The book won the inaugural Westport Prize for Literature.

Her most recent book is Dead and Alive, a collection of 32 essays published in October 2025 that turned up on the year’s best-of lists at The New Yorker and Time. It gathers pieces on the painters Kara Walker and Celia Paul, her long review of the film Tár, which made her a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and goodbyes to Toni Morrison and Joan Didion. Music keeps creeping back in: she appears on “Vivid Light” from Blood Orange’s album Essex Honey, and performed it with Devonté Hynes at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios in December 2025.

She turned 51 the day after the Southbank conversation, a quarter of a century on from the book she will not reopen. The crowd came for White Teeth, but what she built afterwards is the better argument for reading her: a writer who refused to keep writing the same book, and kept getting better at the ones that followed.

Tags: writers, novelists, Dua Lipa, Zadie Smith, White Teeth, Nick Laird

Zadie Smith, the novelist who has never reread White Teeth, the debut that made her famous

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