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The former New York Times book critic was known for her devastating pans. Now she’s up to something very different.

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three...

Literary culture arranged a peculiar fate for Zadie Smith. She became a major novelist before she had written a good novel. Major, that is, by acclaim: sponsorship, awards, sales, gushing reviews. But the novels thus garlanded only partly justified their prominence. White Teeth (2000), written while she was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, is flippant rather than comic; it is full of painfully unpersuasive characters and scenes — for instance the halal butcher who kills six pigeons with a single swipe from a meat-cleaver. The Autograph Man (2002) is marked by a profound rhetorical instab...

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; plus a novella; three collections of essays; short stories, and the play, The Wife of Willesden. She’s also the editor of The Book of Other People. She was twice shortlisted, and once winner of the Women’s Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker. Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives. The Fraud, her first historical novel, is published by Hamish Hamilton on Thursday.

After 17 years abroad, Zadie Smith has returned to her literary stomping ground of north London. She talks about fame, therapy and finding inspiration for her new historical novel on her doorstep