Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

Novelist                          

Selected Works:

Mirrored Box - The Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories  - 1995
The Newspaper Man - The Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories  - 1996
Mrs Begum's Son and the Private Tutor - The Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories  - 1997
Picnic, Lightning - The Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories  - 1997
Stuart - The New Yorker - 1999
The Girl with Bangs - Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 6, 2001
The Trials of Finch - The New Yorker - 2002
Martha, Martha - Granta 81: Best of Young British Novelists  - 2003
Hanwell in Hell - The New Yorker - 27 September 2004
Hanwell Snr - The New Yorker - 14 May 2007; collected in The Book of Other People  - 2007

Novels:

White Teeth  - 2000
The Autograph Man  - 2002
On Beauty  - 2005

Edited Collections:

Piece of Flesh  - 2001, an anthology of erotic short stories featuring Daren King, Toby Litt and Matt Thorne

The Book of Other People  - 2007

Non-fiction:

On the Road: American Writers and Their Hair, essay written to be read aloud at Neal Pollack's Timothy McSweeney's Festival of Literature, Theater, and Music, 2001
We proceed in Iraq as hypocrites and cowards, and the world knows it - The Guardian, 27 February 2003
The divine Ms H - The Guardian, 1 July 2003, an essay on Katharine Hepburn
The Limited Circle is Pure - The New Republic, 3 November 2003, an essay on Franz Kafka for a 2005 reissue of The Trial, for which she also wrote a foreword
Love, Actually - The Guardian, 1 November 2003, an essay on E M Forster - based on her lecture at the Gielgud Theatre in London on 22 October 2003
You Are In Paradise - The New Yorker, 14 June 2004, essay on holidays
Shades of Greene - The Guardian, 18 September 2004, introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Zen of Eminem - VIBE 2005, an essay on the rap star Eminem
We are Family - The Guardian, 4 March 2005, an interview by Zadie Smith with her brother Doc Brown
Nature's Work of Art - The Guardian, 15 September 2005, an essay on Greta Garbo
Fail Better - The Guardian, 13 January 2007, an essay on writing
What Does Soulful Mean? - The Guardian, 1 September 2007, an essay on Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
F Kafka, Everyman - The New York Review of Books, 17 July 2008, a review of The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay, by Louis Begley
Dead Man Laughing - The New Yorker, 22 & 29 December 2008, a personal history of humour appreciation in her family
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays  - 12 November 2009, a collection of essays on writing

An essay is an act of imagination It still takes quite as much art as fiction - The Guardian, 21 November 2009, an essay on the novel.

Generation Why? - The New York Review of Books, 25 November 2010, a review of The Social Network, a film directed by David Fincher, and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier                          

Mother Yvonne Bailey
Father Harvey Smith
Husband Nick Laird, one daughter.