Award-winning British author Zadie Smith to read, discuss her work Nov. 21 - University of Richmond Award-winning British author Zadie Smith to read, discuss her work Nov. 21 November 13, 2013 Zadie Smith, an award-winning British novelist and short-story writer, will read from and speak about her work on Nov. 21, 7 p.m., at the University of Richmond’s Brown-Alley Room in Weinstein Hall. A question-and-answer session and book signing will follow. Smith published her debut novel “White Teeth” in 2000 to critical acclaim, with the book later being named to Time magazine’s list of the “100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.” She has since written three more novels, and won the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006, the same year she was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She was twice named as one of the 20 Best Young Authors by Granta magazine. Smith’s latest novel, “NW,” was published in 2012.

The event is part of the university’s 2013-14 Writers Series, sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences. The series’ mission is “to expose Richmond students, the greater university community and city residents to some of today’s most celebrated writers.” For more information, contact Emily Tarchokov at 804-289-8287 or etarchok@richmond.edu . ### White Teeth : Zadie Smith : 9780140297782 Add to basket Add to wishlist Description Published in the first month of the first year of the new century, Zadie Smith's debut novel White Teeth - winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award - was an immediate bestseller and stunningly acclaimed. One of the most talked about fictional debuts of ever, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike.

Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book. 'Funny, clever ...and a rollicking good read' Independent 'An astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious ...I was delighted' Salman Rushdie 'The almost preposterous talent was clear from the first pages' Julian Barnes, Guardian 'Quirky, sassy and wise ...a big, splashy, populous production reminiscent of books by Dickens and Salman Rushdie ...demonstrates both an instinctive storytelling talent and a fully fashioned voice that's street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time' New York Times 'Smith writes like an old hand, and, sometimes, like a dream' New Yorker 'Outstanding .

..A strikingly clever and funny book with a passion for ideas, for language and for the rich tragic-comedy of life' Sunday Telegraph 'Do believe the hype' The Times 'Relentlessly funny ...idiosyncratic, and deeply felt' Guardian Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. Her debut novel, White Teeth, won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize, and was included in TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Her second novel, On Beauty, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has written two further novels, The Autograph Man and NW, a collection of essays Changing My Mind, and also edited short story anthology The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was chosen by Granta as one of its twenty best young British novelists in 2003, and as well as to Granta has contributed writing to the New Yorker and the Guardian.

Zadie Smith's new novel, NW, is available from September 2012. show more Product details 112 x 180 x 42mm | 299.37g Publication date 9780140297782 Contemporary Fiction About Zadie Smith Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. She is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty and NW, as well as The Embassy of Cambodia and a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and lives in London and New York with her husband and two children. Her next novel, Swing Time, is forthcoming in autumn 2016. show more Review Text Zadie Smith's fizzing first novel is ... an astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by White Teeth, and often impressed.Salman RushdieOne of the most talked about fictional débuts of recent years, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike.

Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.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. show more White Teeth « The British Blacklist Naomie Harris White Teeth is a 2000 novel by the British author Zadie Smith . It focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends—the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones, and their families in London.

The book won multiple honours, including the 2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2000 Whitbread Book Award in category best first novel, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. A four-part television adaptation of the novel was made and broadcast on Channel 4 in 2002. It was directed by Julian Jarrold and stars Om Puri as Samad and Phil Davis as Archie. Each episode focuses on a major male character as he encounters a turning point in his life: The Peculiar Second Marriage of Archie Jones, The Temptation of Samad Iqbal, The Trouble With Millat, and The Return of Magid Iqbal. More Information... The story… It\’s New Year\’s Day 1975 at the beginning of the novel, and we are introduced to Archie Jones, a 47-year-old man whose disturbed Italian wife has just walked out on him.

Archie is attempting to commit suicide by gassing himself in his car, when a chance interruption causes him to change his mind. Filled with a fresh enthusiasm for life, Archie flips a coin and finds his way into the aftermath of a New Year\’s Eve party. There he meets the much-younger Clara, a Jamaican woman whose mother is a devout Jehovah\’s Witness. They are soon married and have a daughter, Irie, who grows up to be intelligent but with low self-confidence. Samad, who has emigrated to Britain after World War II, has married Alsana. Alsana is also much younger than he is, and their union is the product of a traditional arranged marriage. They have twin boys, Magid and Millat, who are the same age as Irie. The marriage is quite rocky, as their devotion to Islam in an English life is troublesome. Samad is continually tormented by what he sees as the effects of this cultural conflict upon his own moral character and sends 10-year-old Magid to Bangladesh in the hope that he will grow up properly under the teachings of Islam. From then on, the lives of the two boys follow very different paths.

Ironically, Magid becomes an atheist and devotes his life to science (a grave disappointment to Samad). Whereas Millat, despite his earlier womanizing and drinking, eventually becomes an angry fundamentalist and part of a Muslim brotherhood known as the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (or KEVIN). The lives of the Jones and Iqbal families intertwine with that of the Chalfens, a Jewish-Catholic family of Cambridge educated intellectuals. The father, Marcus Chalfen, is a brilliant but socially inept geneticist working on a controversial \’FutureMouse\’ project. The mother, Joyce Chalfen, is a part-time housewife with an often entirely misguided desire to mother and \’heal\’ Millat. Although they wish to be thought of as intellectual liberals, the Chalfens often demonstrate complete cultural ignorance and a blindness to the changes happening in their own family. Later on in the story, Clara\’s mother, a strict Jehovah\’s Witness, becomes involved along with Clara\’s ex-boyfriend when Irie runs away from home. Returned from Bangladesh, Magid works as Marcus\’ research assistant, while Millat is befriended by the Chalfens.

To some extent the family provides a safe haven as they (believe themselves to) accept and understand the turbulent lives of Magid and Millat. However, this sympathy comes at the expense of their own son, Josh, whose difficulties are ignored by his parents as he, too, begins to rebel against his background. The strands of the narrative grow closer as Millat and KEVIN, Josh and a radical animal rights group (FATE), and Clara\’s mother (Hortense) and her religious connections all begin to oppose FutureMouse as an evil interference with their own beliefs and plan to stop it. Irie, who has been working for Marcus, briefly succeeds in her long-hidden attraction to Millat but is rejected under his KEVIN-inspired beliefs. Irie believes that Millat cannot love her, for he has always been \’the second son\’ both symbolically and literally; Millat was born two minutes after Magid. After losing her virginity to Millat, she makes Magid the \’second son\’ for a change by sleeping with him right after. This causes her to become pregnant, and she is left unsure of the father of her child, as the brothers are identical twins.

Extraordinary consequences result as the seemingly divergent stories of the main characters coalesce in a stunning finale—the unveiling of FutureMouse, the revelatory actions of the warring groups, and of a long-kept secret from Samad and Archie\’s past. The story mixes pathos and humour, all the while illustrating the dilemmas of immigrants and their offspring as they are confronted by a new, and very different, society. The reader can determine certain qualities and negativities about certain non-British cultures while they are contrasted in the setting of an altogether different host culture. Middle-and working-class British cultures are also satirised through the characters of the Chalfens and Archie. As part of the characters\’ experience as immigrants, they are confronted with conflicts between assimilating and preserving their cultures. The novel depicts the lives of a wide range of backgrounds, including Afro-Caribbean, Muslim, and Jewish. Just as the quote at the beginning of the novel states, “What is past is prologue.” Smith uses the characters and their various cultural backgrounds to show the complexity involved in immigration and replanting one’s roots. For instance, first generation characters are confronted with pressures to assimilate into British society and preserve their native cultures.

Consequently, many become conflicted and have difficulty finding a place in their new surroundings. Characters such as Alsana, Samad, and Clara all face complications when assimilating into British culture and as a result experience a continued sense of ‘unrootedness’. They are unable to replant their roots in a new territory. Smith uses second generation characters Irie, Magid, and Millat, to demonstrate how the impacts of immigration are augmented over time. These characters do not feel any more strongly connected to Britain despite being born there. To the contrary, Irie, Magid, and Millat are greatly affected by their parents’s ‘unrootedness’, and they also have difficulty finding a place. Their assimilation process is even more complicated, because they are farther removed from their native cultures. All of the characters in White Teeth exhibit that knowing one’s roots is not always a liberating experience and can be very challenging for immigrants and those with mixed racial backgrounds. Lineage and culture cannot be traced easily; it veers into many different directions due to migration and ‘unrootedness’. The multiple view points allow for Smith to approach the idea of multiculturalism and the racial undercurrents of Western society from the viewpoints of many different characters.

While characters like Alsana deal with the prejudices of London society, she, too, can subscribe to similar prejudices. “Black people are often friendly, though Alsana, smiling at Clara, and adding this subconsciously to the short ‘pro’ side of the pro and con list she had on the black girl. From every minority she disliked, Alsana liked to single out one specimen for spiritual forgiveness.” The wider scope of characters allows Smith to delve into all the people populating a community, viewing it from all sides and all nuances. Smith once wrote “I just wanted to show that there are communities that function well. There\’s sadness for the way tradition is fading away but I wanted to show people making an effort to understand each other, despite their cultural differences.” While the main families in the plot attempt to create lives for themselves, there is still a struggle to hold on to their past. For instance, Samad feels that the English life is not conducive to an adequate Islamic upbringing. He attempts to preserve Magid’s faith and sends him to Bangladesh, yet Magid grows up to be a man of science, not faith. Millat moves in the opposite direction: he becomes involved with KEVIN, a militant and fundamentalist Islamic group.

Irie is obsessed with the question of one\’s roots. She is excited to visit Jamaica with her grandmother, but at the same time hates her kinky African hair and her Jamaican curves. She dreams of a future when roots will not matter. When she gets pregnant and realizes she\’ll never know who the father is, she is almost happy her daughter will not have to deal with problem of roots. Roots are a pervasive theme in White Teeth. Samad clutches onto them, viewing them as sacred and necessary. He worries that he or his family will lose their roots. Samad once says to Archie regarding his children losing their roots, “People call it assimilation when it is nothing but corruption. Corruption!” Archie doesn\’t have any roots, and Clara tries to escape hers. She leaves her mother and Jehovah\’s Witness past behind, but can never truly purge it. “But how fragile is Clara\’s atheism! Like one of those tiny glass doves Hortense keeps in the living-room cabinet–a breath would knock it over.” Religion is a large part of both the Bowdens\’ and the Iqbals\’ roots.

Hortense is preoccupied with continuing the Jehovah\’s Witness tradition, and Samad worries about losing his Muslim faith. The leitmotif of teeth and in particular the white teeth of the title play a recurring role throughout. While the families in the book have numerous things that set them apart, white teeth is an overarching quality. No matter the color of their skin, the religion they follow, or the country they come from–they have white teeth. Although Clara loses her teeth in a moped accident early on in the narrative, they are replaced by a set of false ones, the existence of which is only discovered by her daughter when she is a teenager. Irie\’s decision (if it can be classed as her own decision) to become a dentist is another recurrence of this theme. Irie, by becoming a dentist and looking after the teeth of her community, shows that she is trying to look after a unifying element in society, rather than the diversifying elements. This unifying element (unifying parts of different cultures in a new host culture) is a typical theme of literature by and about the offspring of immigrants in different cultures. This book also delves into the concepts of human relationship.

Archie and Samad remain best friends despite the failed relationships of their families and culture. Magid and Millat, on the other hand, do not approve of each other\’s lives and never become cordial brothers. If any information on this page is missing or incorrect please contact The British Blacklist: info@thebritishblacklist.com 'White Teeth' Author Zadie Smith to Speak | Dartmouth News 'White Teeth' Author Zadie Smith to Speak January 27, 2016 by Hannah Silverstein, MALS '09 The daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father, novelist Zadie Smith writes stories about people who straddle different cultures and ideologies, from Bangladeshi immigrants in London to Jehovah’s Witness converts to affluent professionals still reluctantly tied to their working-class roots. zadie-smith-250.jpg Award-winning author Zadie Smith will be on campus on Feb. 2. (Photo by Dominique Nabokov) Smith will be on campus to discuss her work at 4 p.m., Feb. 2, in Oopik Auditorium in the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center.

The event is sponsored by Dartmouth’s Leslie Center for the Humanities . “I find myself falling back in love with stories and appreciating anew what an unprecedented privilege it is to make your living telling them,” Smith told the 2014 Moth Ball Gala, at which she accepted the Moth Award for storytelling. “The unlikeliest story of my life is the one about the girl from Willesden who found readers in the United States.” Read More Salman Rushdie Calls for a Return to Magic in Fiction Her debut novel, White Teeth, came out in 2000 and told the interconnected stories of the multicultural residents of Willesden, North West London—the neighborhood where Smith grew up and a place that has become as much a character as it is a setting in her novels, from White Teeth to NW, published in 2012. White Teeth was a sensation—it won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award—and launched what has become a prolific and celebrated career.

Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man, won The Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize, and her third novel, On Beauty, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her short stories, essays, and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books, among others. As a journalist, she has interviewed Jay-Z and written about comedy duo Key and Peele, among other subjects. Her essays have addressed the finer points of what makes jokes funny, code-switching, motherhood, and global warming. She currently teaches creative writing at New York University. Following a discussion with Graziella Parati , the director of the Leslie Center, and Leslie Center postdoctoral fellow Nisha Kommattam, Smith will answer questions from the audience, then meet with undergraduate and graduate student members of Students for the Humanities in the Leslie Center. Smith’s visit is part of an ongoing series organized by the Leslie Center. “Our goal is to present some of the most significant writers of the Western world working today and create opportunities for students and faculty to engage in dialogue with them,” Parati says.

In October, the center brought Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje to campus. Ondaatje, who described himself as a “compulsive editor,” read from a selection of his poetry and fiction and engaged Parati and members of the audience in a wide-ranging discussion about the creative process, translating novels to film, and how to write about violence without glorifying it. In the spring, the Leslie Center will host former Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky, cartoonist Rutu Modan, and Pultizer Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri. Author Zadie Smith shares bits of her unpublished fourth novel, 'Swing, Time' | Hub Author Zadie Smith shares bits of her unpublished fourth novel, 'Swing, Time' New work, to be published next fall, explores acclaimed British writer's enduring fascinations with class, race Image credit: Larry Canner By Katie Pearce / Published Jan 19, 2017 Zadie Smith has said her new novel, her first since 2012's NW, concerns itself with "tap dancing, blackness, and time." The author shared two chapters of the unpublished work Tuesday night with a full crowd at Johns Hopkins University.

Image credit: Larry Canner The forthcoming novel, Swing, Time, is about "two brown girls," Smith said—both biracial, both dancers, who grow up together in a poor London neighborhood but diverge in adulthood in the 1990s. The feistier one, Tracy, pursues dancing professionally, while the unnamed first-person narrator becomes a personal assistant to a pop star. Swing, Time will be the fourth full-length work of fiction for the award-winning British author and essayist, who first vaulted to worldwide attention at just 24 with her debut novel White Teeth in 2000. The writer, now 40, is juggling a number of projects at the moment, including her second essay collection and a sci-fi movie script she's writing with her husband, poet Nick Laird. Swing, Time, titled after a Depression-era Fred Astaire movie, is expected to be released next fall. Like many of Smith's works, the new book includes settings in the Northwest London borough where the writer grew up, and it explores her enduring fascinations with class and race.

(Smith herself is half-Jamaican and was raised in British public housing before attending Cambridge University.) Also see: Author Zadie Smith on family, freedom and facing the truth (The Baltimore Sun) At the Hopkins event, part of the President's Reading Series , Smith flashed between humor and solemnity as she read passages that gave a sense of her protagonist. The character is timid and plain beside her friend Tracy's flamboyance; her black mother is a radical activist who achieves some prominence. In one chapter, the narrator and Tracy attend a formative birthday party at age 10, which ends jarringly "with a lesson in sex and language." The second chapter finds the narrator at 19, at a second-rate college by the sea in England. She's entranced with the ideas, intellectualism, and drugs she finds there, and also with a passionate but deeply arrogant young man named Rakim. Asked why she didn't name her narrator, Smith said she wanted to write this novel as "one fluid dream," in first person. Though she said the book isn't autobiographical, she was influenced by a personal experience helping out for a stint at a homeless shelter in Northwest London.

She found herself discussing a lot of conspiracy theories there, about the Illuminati for one. Smith said the idea of conspiracy, which she sees as "a symbol of a yearning for knowledge" in the absence of a formal educational structure, forms a thread throughout the novel. Known for the steady strain of dry humor in her writing, Smith said, "I love to write dialogue—but it very quickly becomes very comic. I can't seem to control it. I use it in the book when I want to get laughs." As a kid, she said, she was "obsessed with comedy." Asked about her non-writing jobs, Smith said she hasn't held many aside from teaching creative writing, which she has done at Harvard, Cambridge, and now at New York University. (She and her family currently divide time between New York City and London.) "Basically, writing has been my life," Smith said. "I think writers should have jobs, but it just didn't work out that way for me." White Teeth by Zadie Smith on iBooks This book is available for download with iBooks on your Mac or iOS device, and with iTunes on your computer. Books can be read with iBooks on your Mac or iOS device.

Description Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. 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 irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith.

Set against London’ s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Look for Zadie Smith’s new book Swing Time, coming November 2016. From the Trade Paperback edition. From Publishers Weekly Apr 03, 2000 – The scrambled, heterogeneous sprawl of mixed-race and immigrant family life in gritty London nearly overflows the bounds of this stunning, polymathic debut novel by 23-year-old British writer Smith. Traversing a broad swath of cultural territory with a perfect ear for the nuances of identity and social class, Smith harnesses provocative themes of science, technology, history and religion to her narrative. Hapless Archibald Jones fights alongside Bengali Muslim Samad Iqbal in the English army during WWII, and the two develop an unlikely bond that intensifies when Samad relocates to Archie's native London.

Smith traces the trajectory of their friendship through marriage, parenthood and the shared disappointments of poverty and deflated dreams, widening the scope of her novel to include a cast of vibrant characters: Archie's beautiful Jamaican bride, Clara; Archie and Clara's introspective daughter, Irie; Samad's embittered wife, Alsana; and Alsana and Samad's twin sons, Millat and Magid. Torn between the pressures of his new country and the old religious traditions of his homeland, Samad sends Magid back to Bangladesh while keeping Millat in England. But Millat falls into delinquency and then religious extremism, as earnest Magid becomes an Anglophile with an interest in genetic engineering, a science that Samad and Millat repudiate. Smith contrasts Samad's faith in providence with Magid's desire to seize control of the future, involving all of her characters in a debate concerning past and present, determinism and accident. The tooth--half root, half protrusion--makes a perfect trope for the two families at the center of the narrative.

A remarkable examination of the immigrant's experience in a postcolonial world, Smith's novel recalls the hyper-contemporary yet history-infused work of Rushdie, sharp-edged, fluorescent and many-faceted. © Publishers Weekly Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Seller: Penguin Random House LLC Print Length: 464 Pages Language: English Requirements: To view this book, you must have an iOS device with iBooks 1.3.1 or later and iOS 4.3.3 or later, or a Mac with iBooks 1.0 or later and OS X 10.9 or later. Customer Ratings White Teeth - Zadie Smith - Google Books 0 Reviews Zadie Smith's White Teeth is a classic international bestseller and an unforgettable portrait of London One of the most talked about fictional debuts ever, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike.

Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book. 'Funny, clever ... and a rollicking good read' Independent 'An astonishingly assured d but, funny and serious ... I was delighted' Salman Rushdie 'The almost preposterous talent was clear from the first pages' Julian Barnes, Guardian 'Quirky, sassy and wise ... a big, splashy, populous production reminiscent of books by Dickens and Salman Rushdie ... demonstrates both an instinctive storytelling talent and a fully fashioned voice that's street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time' New York Times 'Smith writes like an old hand, and, sometimes, like a dream' New Yorker 'Outstanding ... A strikingly clever and funny book with a passion for ideas, for language and for the rich tragic-comedy of life' Sunday Telegraph 'Do believe the hype' The Times 'Relentlessly funny ...

idiosyncratic, and deeply felt' Guardian Zadie Smith - Literature Literature A. P. Watt Ltd Biography Novelist Zadie Smith was born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She read English at Cambridge, graduating in 1997. Her acclaimed first novel, White Teeth (2000), is a vibrant portrait of contemporary multicultural London, told through the story of three ethnically diverse families. The book won a number of awards and prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). It also won two EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards) for Best Book/Novel and Best Female Media Newcomer, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Author's Club First Novel Award. White Teeth has been translated into over twenty languages and was adapted for Channel 4 television for broadcast in autumn 2002.

Her tenure as Writer in Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts resulted in the publication of an anthology of erotic stories entitled Piece of Flesh (2001). She also wrote the introduction for The Burned Children of America (2003), a collection of eighteen short stories by a new generation of young American writers. Zadie Smith's second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), a story of loss, obsession and the nature of celebrity, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Her third novel, On Beauty, was published in 2005, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also written a non-fiction book about writing - Fail Better (2006); and Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009). Zadie Smith became a tenured professor of fiction at New York University in 2010 and lives between New York City and London. Her latest novel is NW (2012), set in north west London.

Critical perspective Zadie Smith made an astonishing literary debut with White Teeth (2000). This first novel initially became notable for the publicity it received in 1997 when Smith accepted a six-figure advance for both this work, which was yet to be completed, and a future second novel. This advance is also remarkable because it was offered when she was only 21 years old and still studying English Literature at Cambridge. The publicity that arose from this commercial faith in her writing undoubtedly ensured the attention of literary critics once it was completed. However, the mainly positive reviews, several awards (including the Whitbread First Novel Award) and high sales of over a million copies, have demonstrated that the hype could be believed: there has been a general consensus that White Teeth is impressive in its fluidity and scope. Smith has since described White Teeth as a naïve product of her adolescence (The Guardian, 25 August 2002), but its success has meant that her novels have continued to be of great interest in international literary circles. As though to legitimise Smith’s burgeoning reputation, reviewers have compared her favourably (based on her first two novels) with established contemporary writers such as Salman Rushdie, and occasionally with Martin Amis.

The comparison with Rushdie is somewhat tenuous, and appears to be based on their loose common interest in deconstructing Western mythologies of racial stereotypes. A similarity with Amis’s style may be seen more clearly, though, especially when comparing her second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), with Amis’s Money (1984) and the more recent Yellow Dog (2003). White Teeth is broad in its reach with its use of themes such as history, the search for identity, the ethics of science and multiculturalism. Furthermore, the examination of the interaction between the members of three London-based central families (the Joneses, the Iqbals and the Chalfens) makes this a sprawling work. With these numerous protagonists, Smith demonstrates an effective use of humour and critical insight. On a more abstract level, the intermittent references to the end of the world and the impending millennium mean that the heightened moment of uncertainty about the future and the past becomes yet another focus. If there is a drawback to White Teeth, it lies in the same expansiveness that has attracted praise.

The Autograph Man is more concentrated, as it depends mainly on the anxieties and desires of the eponymous hero (Alex-Li Tandem, the autograph man). Fewer central characters dominate the stage, but, like its predecessor, the novel engages with contemporary cultural concerns. An understanding of obsession and celebrity, and the desire for truth (in the guise of an authentic autograph), underpin the plot, as Alex searches for and finds Kitty Alexander, the ageing B-movie actress. Besides the invocation of the obviously contemporary subject of fame and its drawbacks, The Autograph Man, a more poignant novel than White Teeth, also examines the grief felt by Alex for his dead father. This second novel is less dependent on humour, although it is still comedic in places, and prefers, instead, to use a postmodern irony against itself. That is, irony is used throughout the novel to expose at the end that there is still a need for friendship and remembrance in a world dominated by superficiality. The main textual influence that helped to shape the third novel, On Beauty (2005), is clearly marked out by Smith in her acknowledgements, where she declares that this work repays E.M. Forster with ‘hommage’.

The overt (and playful) influence of Howards End may be seen, for example, in the borrowed and re-worked first line. Howards End begins with the following: ‘One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister’, whereas On Beauty uses a modern equivalent: ‘One may as well begin with Jerome’s emails to his father’. The developing relationship between Mrs Carlene Kipps and Kiki (Mrs Belsey) is also a purposely derivative strand, as Mrs Kipps bequeaths a painting to Kiki by way of a scrap of paper. This is also a campus novel and is a partial testament to Smith’s university background, in particular her time spent at Cambridge and Harvard Universities, and her interest in the implications of not belonging. As with her previous two novels, the politics of race and gender are underlying concerns and humour is deployed once more to explode the pretensions of those who fail to examine their own perspectives. In this instance, Howard Belsey, the English white liberal who demands censorship, and Monty Kipps, the conservative English Afro-Caribbean who questions the effectiveness of positive discrimination, are the main objects of Smith’s satire.

The rivalry between these two ideologically-opposed characters gives shape to the main plot. The relationship between this novel and Howards End may be seen ultimately in the proclamation in both to ‘only connect’. On Beauty firmly reiterates, beneath the surface satire, how connections in human relationships are essential for a happy life and, as Frank Rich argues in his review of On Beauty for The New York Times, Smith ‘never loses her own serious moral compass or forsakes her pursuit of the transcendent’ (18 September, 2005). This quotation is also relevant for her previous two novels, as each one reiterates a transcendent faith in ethical living. As well as writing novels, Smith has also edited the short story collections Piece of Flesh (2001) and The Book of Other People (2007), and has written introductions for The Burned Children of America (2003) and The Best American Non-Required Reading 2003 (2003).

She has also produced Fail Better: The Morality of the Novel (2006), a collection of essays that engage with 20th-century writers and embrace the Aristotelian view of fiction as a ‘hypothetical area’ to act (The Atlantic Online, 16 September 2005). The title is derivative of Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1983), which suggests that Smith approves of Beckett’s brand of desperate brand of affirmation: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ In 2009 she published a further collection of ‘occasional essays’, Changing My Mind. Smith’s journalism shows impressive range, from reportage (a week spent in civil war-torn Liberia, a trip to the Oscars), to literary criticism (a further appraisal of Forster, essays on George Eliot and Kafka), to family memoir (an account of her attempts to encourage her father to describe his experiences during the Second World War) Changing My Mind also included ‘That Crafty Feeling’, a lecture given to students of Columbia University’s writing programme, in which Smith describes her how she wrote her previous three novels.

She declares with knowing self-deprecation that although she experiments with form during this process, ‘Because I am an English novelist enslaved to an ancient tradition, with each novel I have ended up exactly where I began: third person, past tense.’ With NW (2012) however, despite returning to the postcode she knows so well, Smith decisively and deliberately unleashes the experimental and modernist tendencies that hitherto had not been allowed to surface in her long fiction. Structurally the novel is purposefully imbalanced: the first 80 page section of the novel is written in the present tense but the third and longest, 110 page section, is divided into 184 miniature subsections, some only a few words long. Capital letters are used liberally throughout for amplification. Alternative typefaces are deployed to mimic text messages, webchats or quotations from writings written or read by the characters. Occasionally words are rearranged on the page, to represent epitaphs on gravestones, a list drawn up by children, walking directions, and even the shapes of an apple tree and a human mouth.

Guided by modernist antecedents in such ways, initially it seems by the example of James Joyce’s Ulysses, this discontinuous and fluid novel describes with considerable success the chaotic and contingent, heard and felt, tasted and smelt experience of living in and crucially moving around the contemporary capital. Engaged on the Joycean ramblings around Smith’s home territory of Willesden are four Londoners of Smith’s own generation, all of whom grew up on the same fictional Caldwell estate. With the exception of childhood friends Leah and Keisha their narratives intersect only marginally, and the way that each character inhabits a stylistically distinct section of the novel echoes the disconnected experience of city living. NW is noisy, claustrophobic and suffused with quotations from a diverse repertoire of high and low cultural sources including Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt, John Donne, tabloid newspapers, and lyrics from the hip hop verse of Nas and the songs of fellow North Londoner Ray Davies; it is surely no coincidence, moreover, that Keisha’s surname is Blake. Recent moments in popular cultural history, such as the death of Michael Jackson, the popularity of the television series The Wire and the arrival of tablet computers are also obliquely registered and gently satirised.

With greater vigour than its predecessors, the novel also explores modern English social, racial and gender codes, as Smith charts the evolving tensions between friends whose social statuses begin to diverge (Keisha tellingly reinvents herself as Natalie as she journeys from Caldwell to commercial law practice), or describes the troubled relationship between a drug-addled aristocrat and a reformed drug-dealer. Dr Julie Ellam, 2007, Dr Guy Woodward, 2013 Bibliography White Teeth by Zadie Smith Salman Rushdie Zadie Smith's White Teeth is a delightfully cacophonous tale that spans 25 years of two families' assimilation in North London. The Joneses and the Iqbals are an unlikely a pairing of families, but their intertwined destinies distill the British Empire's history and hopes into a dazzling multiethnic melange that is a pure joy to read. Smith proves herself to be a master at drawing fully-realized, vibrant characters, and she demonstrates an extraordinary ear for dialogue. It is a novel full of humor and empathy that is as inspiring as it is enjoyable. White Teeth is ambitious in scope and artfully rendered with a confidence that is extremely rare in a writer so young.

It boggles the mind that Zadie Smith is only 24 years old, and this novel is a clarion call announcing the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction. It is a raucous yet poignant look at modern life in London and is clearly the book to read this summer.

Question: ‘White Teeth’ was the award-winning 2000 debut novel of which British author?
Answer: Zadie Smith