Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975, and continues to live in the area. White Teeth is her first novel, written in 1997 while Smith, only twenty-one then, was in her senior year at Cambridge University. Almost two-and-a-half years later, White Teeth was completed and about to be published. It has earned her comparisons with Salman Rushdie and the kind of success that most young novelists can only dream of.
White Teeth has won awards for Best Book and Best Female Newcomer at the BT Emma Awards (Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards), the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Prize for a first novel in 2000, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction 2000, the WH Smith Book Award for New Talent, the Frankfurt ebook Award for Best Fiction Work and both the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award and Overall Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Author interviews
