From 1967 to 1974 Smith attended St. Joseph's RC Primary school.
Gallery of Ali Smith
Smith studied at Inverness High School, leaving in 1980.
College/University
Gallery of Ali Smith
Smith studied a joint degree in English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen from 1980 to 1985, coming first in her class in 1982, and gaining a top first in Senior Honours English in 1984.
Gallery of Ali Smith
From 1985 to 1990 Smith attended Newnham College in Cambridge, and studied for a Ph.D. in American and Irish modernism. During her time at Cambridge, she began writing plays, and as a result did not receive her doctorate degree.
Career
Gallery of Ali Smith
Ali Smith, photographed at home by Felicity McCabe in February 2015 for the New Statesman.
Gallery of Ali Smith
Ali Smith, photographed for an interview.
Gallery of Ali Smith
Ali Smith was nominated for the Man Booker Prize for her novel How to Be Both.
Gallery of Ali Smith
Ali Smith signing books at Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Gallery of Ali Smith
A photo of Ali Smith in her room.
Gallery of Ali Smith
A photo of Ali Smith during one of her interview in 2011.
Gallery of Ali Smith
Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, interviews Ali Smith at a book festival event.
Gallery of Ali Smith
Ali Smith and a guest at the Orange Prize Awards ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall on June 3, 2009 in London, England.
Achievements
A photo which was posted to announce that Ali Smith has won the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
Membership
Royal Society of Literature
2007
In 2007 Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Awards
Whitbread Novel of the Year Award
Ali Smith won the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year award.
Goldsmiths Prize
Ali Smith was the winner of the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize.
Costa Book Novel Award
Ali Smith won the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards.
Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
Ali Smith after receiving the Baileys Women's Prize For Fiction.
Order of the British Empire
Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature.
Smith studied a joint degree in English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen from 1980 to 1985, coming first in her class in 1982, and gaining a top first in Senior Honours English in 1984.
From 1985 to 1990 Smith attended Newnham College in Cambridge, and studied for a Ph.D. in American and Irish modernism. During her time at Cambridge, she began writing plays, and as a result did not receive her doctorate degree.
(Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two ar...)
Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.
(From the critically acclaimed author of Hotel World comes...)
From the critically acclaimed author of Hotel World comes a collection of uniquely inventive stories that thread the labyrinth of coincidence, chance, and connections missed and made.
(From the astonishingly talented writer of The Accidental ...)
From the astonishingly talented writer of The Accidental and Hotel World comes Ali Smith’s brilliant retelling of Ovid’s gender-bending myth of Iphis and Ianthe, as seen through the eyes of two Scottish sisters. Girl Meets Boy is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, and the absurdity of consumerism, as well as a story of reversals and revelations that is as sharply witty as it is lyrical.
(From the Whitbread Award-winning author of The Accidental...)
From the Whitbread Award-winning author of The Accidental and Hotel World comes this stunning collection of stories set in a world of everyday dislocation, where people nevertheless find connection, mystery, and love. These tales are of ordinary but poignant beauty: at the pub, strangers regale each other with memories of Christmases past; lovers share tales over dinner about how they met, their former lovers, and each other; a woman even tells a story to her fourteen-year-old self.
(When a dinner-party guest named Miles locks himself in an...)
When a dinner-party guest named Miles locks himself in an upstairs room and refuses to come out, he sets off a media frenzy. He also sets in motion a mesmerizing puzzle of a novel, one that harnesses acrobatic verbal playfulness to a truly affecting story. Miles communicates only by cryptic notes slipped under the door. We see him through the eyes of four people who barely know him, ranging from a precocious child to a confused elderly woman. But while the characters’ wit and wordplay soar, their story remains profoundly grounded. As it probes our paradoxical need for both separation and true connection, There but for the balances cleverness with compassion, the surreal with the deeply, movingly real, in a way that only Ali Smith can.
(A magical hybrid that refuses to be tied down to either f...)
A magical hybrid that refuses to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.
(Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an ori...)
Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. It’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
(A luminous meditation on the meaning of richness and harv...)
A luminous meditation on the meaning of richness and harvest and worth, Autumn is the first installment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal quartet, and it casts an eye over our own time: Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearean jeu d’esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art. Wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories, Autumn is an unforgettable story about aging and time and love - and stories themselves.
(Ali Smith’s shapeshifting Winter casts a warm, wise, merr...)
Ali Smith’s shapeshifting Winter casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.
(With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffin...)
With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.
Ali Smith is a Scottish writer, playwright and journalist. Her works include five short story collections, ten fiction books, one non-fiction book, and seven plays. She also works as a journalist for The Guardian, The Scotsman, New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement.
Background
Ali Smith was born on August 24, 1962, in Inverness, Scotland, the youngest of five children of a working-class parents, Ann and Donald Smith. Her parents had both left school prematurely, thrust into the world of work by the death of their parents and a shortage of money. Her mother emigrated from the north coast of Northern Ireland and became a clippie on the buses up and down the Moray Firth; when she was old enough, she joined the WAAF where, one day, a pair of electricians came to rewire the bedrooms. One was Smith's father.
Her father founded a small contracting business, wiring up the houses that lined Loch Ness, including that of the writer of Ring of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell. Deprived of education themselves, they determinedly steered their children towards university, with the professions firmly in mind; Smith was to be a lawyer. She wanted to study English; her parents didn't want her to.
Her siblings were quite a bit older than she was; this made her practically an only child. Still, she had what she describes as "an ideal childhood."
She currently lives in Cambridge.
Education
From 1967 to 1974 Smith attended St. Joseph's RC Primary school. Later she went on to Inverness High School, leaving in 1980.
She studied a joint degree in English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen from 1980 to 1985, coming first in her class in 1982, and gaining a top first in Senior Honours English in 1984. She was taught by Bernard MacLaverty, William McIlvanney and Iain Crichton Smith.
From 1985 to 1990 Smith attended Newnham College in Cambridge, and studied for a Ph.D. in American and Irish modernism. During her time at Cambridge, she began writing plays, and as a result did not receive her doctorate degree.
Smith moved to Edinburgh in 1990 and worked as a lecturer of Scottish, English and American literature at the University of Strathclyde. She left the University in 1992 because of her chronic fatigue syndrome.
Smith also held several part-time jobs, including a waitress, lettuce-cleaner, tourist board assistant, receptionist at BBC Highland and advertising copywriter.
While studying for her Ph.D. at Cambridge she wrote several plays which were staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Cambridge Footlights. After some time working in Scotland, she returned to Cambridge and concentrated on her writing. She was focused, in particular, on short stories and freelancing as the fiction reviewer for The Scotsman newspaper.
In 1995 she published her first book, Free Love and Other Stories, a collection of 12 short stories.
She partnered with the Scottish band Trashcan Sinatras and wrote the lyrics to a song called "Half An Apple." The song was released onMarch 5, 2007, on the album Ballads of the Book.
In 2008 Smith produced The Book Lover a collection of her favourite writing including pieces from Sylvia Plath, Muriel Spark, Grace Paley, and Margaret Atwood. In the same year she contributed a short story "Writ" to an anthology supporting Save the Children. The anthology is entitled "The Children's Hours" and was published by Arcadia Books. Foreign editions have been published in Portugal, Italy, China and Korea.
In 2009, she donated the short story Last (previously published in the Manchester Review Online) to Oxfam's "Ox-Tales" project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the "Fire" collection.
In 2011 she wrote a short memoir for The Observer in their "Once upon a life" series: 'Looking back on her life, writer Ali Smith returns to the moment of conception to weave a poignant and funny memoir of an irreverent father, a weakness for Greek musicals and a fateful border crossing.'
In October 2012, she read a sermon at Manchester Cathedral to guests and students, followed by a book signing.
On May 14, 2013 Ali Smith gave the inaugural Harriet Martineau lecture, in celebration of Norwich, UNESCO's 2012 City of Literature.
She also writes articles for The Guardian, The Scotsman, New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement.
Ali Smith is considered to be one of the most prominent writers of modern Britain whose works are described as "entertaining, irreverent, sensitive, thoughtful, shocking and delightful."
During her career she received numerous honors and awards. Her Free Love and Other Stories (1995) was awarded the Saltire First Book of the Year award and Scottish Arts Council Book Award.
Hotel World (2001) was awarded the Encore Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the inaugural Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. It was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
The Accidental (2005) was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and won the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year award.
Girl Meets Boy (2007) became the winner of Diva magazine readers’ choice Book of the Year, and Sundial Scottish Arts Council Novel of the Year.
In 2011 she contributed a short story "Why Holly Berries are as Red as Roses" to an anthology supporting The Woodland Trust. The anthology - Why Willows Weep - has so far helped The Woodland Trust plant approximately 50,000 trees.
There But For The (2011) was cited by the Guardian book review as one of the best novels of the year.
Artful (2012) was shortlisted for the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize (2013).
How to Be Both (2014) was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (winner), and the Folio Prize. It was the winner of the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize and of the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards.
Autumn (2016) was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
On May 14, 2013 Smith gave the inaugural Harriet Martineau lecture, in celebration of Norwich, UNESCO's 2012 City of Literature.
On September 10, 2015 she was nominated Honorary Fellow by Goldsmiths, University of London.
She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature.
In July 2016, Smith was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia.
Smith's Autumn and Winter can be considered political writings. They are a general critique of postmodern alienation and of too much abstracting from the particularity of the contemporary crisis. At the same time, the focus on England in Autumn serves mainly to reveal the constructedness of English identity and the questionable limitations thus maintained. As for Winter, it takes a more domestic approach at addressing the specific mood of Britain’s divided society. Both novels are infused with anxiety about the state of the world, and seasoned with references to Brexit and Trump.
Views
Since her first collection, Free Love and Other Stories, was published in 1995, Smith has tended to alternate between the long and short forms, seeing the story as free where the novel is tied to class and to time.
Like so many modern writers, Smith ponders the pros and cons of the Internet - one of her works contains some of the most interesting observations yet to be seen on this subject and ends with the character, disgusted by porn he has consumed typing the words “something beautiful” into Google and coming to the conclusion “More and more, the pressing human dilemma is: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.”
Quotations:
“I grew up completely alone but with all the comforts of knowing I had a cushioning family structure around me - and yet I could free myself from it.”
“All those rules were a bit of pain when I was 15 and wanted to go out with boys and my mum said no, because 15 was too young. My sisters, really early in the sixties, had been too young for that - but now we were in the seventies, and I said, ‘I want to do that,’ and she said, ‘You will not!’ So it’s all her fault!” She laughs. “There wasn’t even a language for that.”
“If I had kids, I think I’d be a rubbish storyteller.”
“I was profoundly changed by Charlotte's Web. When you fall in love with a book something especially interesting and exciting is happening because of the way language works on us as human beings. And I love language. And I also love butterflies, and cloud-shapes, and types of train. What can I say? The world is a proliferation.”
“The novel is always in one way or another a clock. The minutes will go round. You start here and you end up there.”
“I can’t imagine sitting next to any other politician who actually reads books.”
“We are living in a culture that insists on lying as its delivery of how we are living. It insists on telling us information about which we are left wondering whether it is true or not. Fiction and lies are the opposite of each other. Lies go out of the way to distort and turn you away from the truth. But fiction is one of our ways of telling the truth.”
“Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.”
“Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.”
“I think it's because when you hold a book you're also holding a tree in one form or another, and that direct connection lets me know how important books are in the world. Pages are called leaves, a spine of a book comes from the spine of the animal whose skin was used in the first books as covers; everything about books refers us back to the physical world. Not that ebook readers aren't useful for those of us whose eyes are getting worse with age. But the reading of a book - a physical book - lets us know how time is passing, and how we are passing time, in something more than percentage numbers.”
“Maybe it's easier to talk to someone who won't ever actually hear what you say.”
“But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll probably find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened. And if we don't, we feel cheated.”
“I think nonsense raises two human urges. One: to be playful, be curious and curiouser, and 2: to make meaning out what seems to have none. Or flaunt having none. And since everything we do, being human, is up against time, nonsense is panacheful, cocks a snook at all the rules and regulations and reminds us of our freedoms up against the clock.”
“Whole worlds open up when we start a conversation.”
“Everything, sooner or later, transforms into story.”
“You're going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history. Otherwise there'll be no good hope for your own grand truths and no good truths for your own grandchildren.”
“A whole time can reduce down to a single taste, a moment. A whole person down to the skelf of a self.”
Membership
In 2007 Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Royal Society of Literature
,
United Kingdom
2007
Personality
Smith possesses the perfect characteristics of the short story writer: rigorous self-discipline in the planning process, an eagle eye for condensing detail, a capacity for using the personal and individual to suggest universal truths and a skill for hinting at a wider world beyond the story.
She describes herself as "a really uncool, geeky enthusiast."
Smith is openly lesbian. She once said that the firm way in which her family rules were established just might have had an unanticipated effect on her sexuality.
Smith is not, she says, keen on public appearances, but is a notable supporter of other writers past and present, contributing introductions to forgotten masterpieces, appearing on panels to commemorate the work of, for example, Angela Carter or Tove Jansson.
She doesn't much love being interviewed either, and rarely is.
Her favorite fictional heroine is Emma Woodhouse from Jane Austen's novel Emma.
Physical Characteristics:
In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, Smith talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year.
Quotes from others about the person
Sebastian Barry: "Ali Smith is Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting."
Interests
Writers
Sylvia Plath, Muriel Spark, Grace Paley, Margaret Atwood
Music & Bands
Joni Mitchell, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Elvis Costello, Rickie Lee Jones, Nina Simone
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service.
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service.
University of East Anglia Honorary Degree,
United Kingdom
In July 2016, Smith was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia.
In July 2016, Smith was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia.
