Biography

Her first novel "White Teeth" won the 2000 Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book award.

Studied English Literature at King's College, Cambridge University, England (1994 - 1997), after attending public (state) schools. She said she chose to apply only to Cambridge because that's where all her favorite British authors were educated.

Was nominated for the 2005 Man Booker Prize for the novel On Beauty (but didn't win).

'King's was an incredible experience for me. The reading list required for the English syllabus transformed the way I wrote and the teaching radically changed the way I thought. Add to this a nice river, a lovely room, trees, friends and drink, and the result was the best three years of my life.'

On interviewing Eminem for Vibe magazine: "I never want to do another interview as long as I live. It's not my bag."

When my father was old and I was still young, I came into some money. Though it was money 'earned' for work done, it seemed, both to my father and me, no different than a win on the lottery. We looked at the contract more than once, checking and rechecking it, just like a lottery ticket, to ensure no mistake had been made. No mistake had been made. I was to be paid for writing a book. For a long time, neither of us could work out what to do about this new reality.