Author
Zadie Smith
Birth Date
October 25, 1975
(50 Years)
Associated Country
United Kingdom
Zadie Smith is a British novelist, essayist, and professor known for her vibrant, intellectually engaging writing. She gained international recognition with her debut novel White Teeth, which captured multicultural London with humor, energy, and sharp social observation.
Her work often explores themes of identity, race, class, and cultural hybridity, blending complex ideas with accessible storytelling. Novels like On Beauty and Swing Time highlight her ability to create richly drawn characters while examining the tensions of contemporary life.
In addition to fiction, Smith is an acclaimed essayist and academic, contributing to major publications and teaching creative writing. She is widely regarded as one of the most important and versatile voices in modern literature.
Her work often explores themes of identity, race, class, and cultural hybridity, blending complex ideas with accessible storytelling. Novels like On Beauty and Swing Time highlight her ability to create richly drawn characters while examining the tensions of contemporary life.
In addition to fiction, Smith is an acclaimed essayist and academic, contributing to major publications and teaching creative writing. She is widely regarded as one of the most important and versatile voices in modern literature.
Books
Dead and Alive 2025
In this eagerly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years.
She takes an...
The Fraud 2024
In her first historical novel, Zadie Smith transports the reader to a Victorian England transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant, in which a cockney butcher, recently returned from...
In her stage-writing debut, celebrated novelist and essayist Zadie Smith brings to life a comedic and cutting twenty-first century translation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s classic The Wife of Bath.
The...
Grand Union 2020
Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation.
In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation...
Intimations 2020
Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we...
Feel Free 2018
Sharp, witty, and intellectually restless, Feel Free brings together a wide-ranging collection of essays by Zadie Smith that explore the cultural and personal landscapes of contemporary life. Moving...
Swing Time 2017
Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person...
First published in the New Yorker, The Embassy of Cambodia is a rare and brilliant story that takes us deep into the life of a young woman, Fatou, domestic servant to the Derawals and escapee from one...
NW 2013
Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four locals—Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan—as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their...
Changing My Mind 2010
Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural.
This engaging collection...
On Beauty 2006
On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer...
The Autograph Man 2003
Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. His business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them—all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what...
White Teeth 2001
At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s...