Smith's debut novel,
White Teeth, was introduced to the publishing world in 1997 before it was completed. On the basis of a partial manuscript, an auction for the rights began, which was won by
Hamish Hamilton. Smith completed
White Teeth during her final year at the
University of Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel immediately became a best-seller and received much acclaim. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards, among them the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the
Betty Trask Award. The novel was adapted for television in 2002. In an article for
The Guardian in October 2001, Smith responded to the criticism by agreeing with the accuracy of the term and with Wood's underlying argument that "any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped". However, she rejected her debut being categorised alongside major authors such as
David Foster Wallace,
Salman Rushdie, and
Don DeLillo, and the dismissal of their own innovations on the basis of being "hysterical realism". After the publication of
The Autograph Man, Smith visited the United States as a Fellow of the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at
Harvard University. She started work on a still-unreleased book of essays,
The Morality of the Novel (a.k.a.
Fail Better), in which she considers a selection of 20th-century writers through the lens of
moral philosophy. Some portions of this book presumably appear in the essay collection
Changing My Mind, published in November 2009. Smith's third novel,
On Beauty, was published in September 2005. It is set largely in and around Greater
Boston. It attracted more acclaim than
The Autograph Man: it was shortlisted for the
Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006
Orange Prize for Fiction and the
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Later in the same year, Smith published
Martha and Hanwell, a book that pairs two short stories about two troubled characters, originally published in
Granta and
The New Yorker respectively.
Penguin published
Martha and Hanwell with a new introduction by the author as part of their pocket series to celebrate their 70th birthday. The first story, "Martha, Martha", deals with Smith's familiar themes of race and postcolonial identity, while "Hanwell in Hell" is about a man struggling to cope with the death of his wife. In December 2008, she guest-edited the
BBC Radio 4 Today programme. After teaching fiction at
Columbia University School of the Arts, Smith joined
New York University as a tenured professor of fiction in 2010. Between March and October 2011, Smith was the monthly New Books reviewer for ''
Harper's Magazine. She is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. In 2010, The Guardian'' newspaper asked Smith for her "10 rules for writing fiction". Among them she declared: "Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied." Smith's novel
NW was published in 2012. Set in the
Kilburn area of north-west London, the title being a reference to the
local postcode, NW6, the novel was shortlisted for the
Royal Society of Literature's
Ondaatje Prize and the
Women's Prize for Fiction.
NW was made into a BBC television film with the same title, directed by
Saul Dibb and adapted by
Rachel Bennette. Starring
Nikki Amuka-Bird and
Phoebe Fox, the TV adaptation was broadcast on
BBC Two on 14 November 2016. In September 2013, Smith appeared on
BBC Radio 4's
Desert Island Discs, with her book choice being
Marcel Proust's
À la recherche du temps perdu. In 2015, it was announced that Smith, along with her husband
Nick Laird, was writing the screenplay for a science fiction movie to be directed by French filmmaker
Claire Denis. Smith later said that her involvement in the film, titled
High Life, had been overstated and that she had simply helped to polish the English dialogue for the film. Smith's fifth novel,
Swing Time, was published in November 2016. It drew inspiration from Smith's childhood love of tap dancing. It was longlisted for the
Man Booker Prize 2017. Smith is a contributor to
Margaret Busby's 2019 anthology
New Daughters of Africa (as is her mother Yvonne Bailey-Smith). Smith's first collection of short stories,
Grand Union, was published on 8 October 2019. In 2020, she published six essays in a collection entitled
Intimations, the royalties from which she said she would be donating to the
Equal Justice Initiative and New York's
COVID-19 emergency relief fund. In 2021, Smith debuted her first play,
The Wife of Willesden, which she wrote after learning that her borough in London, Brent, had been selected in 2018 as the 2020 London Borough of Culture. As the most famous current writer from Brent, Smith was the natural choice to author the piece. She chose to adapt "
The Wife of Bath's Tale" in
Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales, recalling how she had translated Chaucer into contemporary English during her studies at Cambridge. The retelling replaces the pilgrimage with a pub crawl set in contemporary London, with the Wife of Bath becoming Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman in her mid-50s who challenges her Auntie P's traditional Christian views on sex and marriage. Like the original tale, Alvita is a woman who has had five husbands, her experiences with them ranging from pleasant to traumatic. The majority of the piece is spent on her talking to the people in the pub, in much the way that the Wife of Bath's prologue is longer than the tale itself. To her, Alvita's voice is a common one that she heard growing up in Brent, and thus writing this play was a natural choice for the festival. The tale itself is set in early 18th-century Jamaica, where a man guilty of rape is brought before Queen
Nanny of the Maroons, who decrees that his punishment is to go and find what women truly desire. In 2023, Smith stated that she had been writing a historical novel since 2020, focusing on Arthur Orton, who was at the centre of the
Tichborne case, a famous 19th-century court case involving identity theft, but spans the period from 1830s to the 1870s (significant for the
Reform Act of 1832 and the abolition of slavery). She said that she tried to avoid Charles Dickens as an influence and subject, but that her research process showed her that there was "really no way to entirely avoid Mr. Charles Dickens" since several of the places and events of her story had a relation to him. The book also includes another real-life novelist of the time, William Ainsworth. Smith's historical novel,
The Fraud, was published in September 2023. Reviewing
The Fraud for
The Independent, Martin Chilton said: "The novel pulls off the trick of being both splendidly modern and authentically old. ...
The Fraud is the genuine article." According to
Karan Mahajan, writing in
The New York Times: "It offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters. ... Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive." In a much longer review, putting
The Fraud in context of Smith's other writings, Colin Burrow in
The London Review of Books, highlights its "spiky delights". Burrow shows how "Smith gives a fresh angle to this often-told tale
[Tichborne case] by concentrating on a key witness in the trials: Andrew Bogle, a Black man who grew up enslaved in Jamaica. There he became the page of Edward Tichborne...who was the manager of the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos's plantations around Kingston....Bogle himself remains the central enigma of the novel....Blowing a hole in earlier literature while feeling its weight is perhaps the main aim of
The Fraud. Its restless movement between the 1830s and 1870s deliberately recalls the temporal span of
Middlemarch" by
George Eliot. In October 2025, Smith's collection of essays
Dead and Alive was published by Hamish Hamilton. ==Other activities==