Zadie Smith books

Anthologies

Non-Fiction

Picture Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in Brent, North London, to a Jamaican mother and an English father. She studied English literature at King’s College, Cambridge, where she began writing White Teeth. The novel was published in 2000, when Smith was just 24, and became an international bestseller praised for its comic portrayal of immigrant life in London.

Smith’s novels often return to North London and its mix of cultures. On Beauty (2005), loosely inspired by E.M. Forster’s Howards End, won the Orange Prize for Fiction. NW (2012) mapped the streets of her home borough of Kilburn, while Swing Time (2016) traced a friendship between two girls who dream of becoming dancers. Her most recent novel, The Fraud (2023), is a historical work set during the Victorian-era Tichborne trial.

Beyond fiction, Smith is a prolific essayist. Her collections Changing My Mind (2009) and Feel Free (2018) cover everything from film and literature to politics and pop culture. She has taught creative writing at New York University and Harvard, and she has also written children’s picture books, including Weirdo (2021) and The Surprise (2022).