‘I need to keep moving’

Author Zadie Smith speaks to Nick Duerden about her groundbreaking debut novel 'White Teeth' 25 years on

-  Nick Duerden

In early 2000, the book that Zadie Smith had begun writing at Cambridge University "as a way of managing anxiety about my exams" entered the world. It was called White Teeth. Its creation had been feverish, and, despite the myriad pressures of university life, it was all she'd been able to think about during her time there.

“I remember being totally obsessed, writing every day, all day,” Smith says now, 25 years and several million sales later. “I’d have a massive fried breakfast at Café Rouge each morning – an insane luxury because it meant you didn’t have to bother with lunch, which breaks up the writing day. Then I’d write and smoke all day until dinner.”

Smith was 24 years old then, the daughter of a white father and a Jamaican mother, and had grown up in northwest London. A voracious reader, she changed her given name of Sadie to Zadie at the age of 14 in deference to one of her favourite writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Her subsequent route to publication was the kind most writers can only dream of: a dizzying advance of £250,000 awarded on just an 80-page extract, and, when her book hit the shelves, a sustaining hype that generated both endless column inches and bestseller status. Her publishers must have been relieved. A quarter of a million pounds on an unknown is quite the punt.

“It’s always impossible to be sure,” says Simon Prosser, Smith’s editor of 25 years at Hamish Hamilton. “But from very early on the responses from anyone who read it suggested that it could be a rare, perhaps even phenomenal, success. The characters and the writing just leapt from the page; the storytelling skill was remarkable; the voice unique.” And Smith’s own reaction? “I never really doubted I was a writer,” she says. “That would have been like doubting I had arms or legs.”

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