Ali Smith

Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, and journalist known for her contributions to contemporary literature, fiction, and literary criticism. Smith studied at the University of Aberdeen and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she began writing plays staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Cambridge Footlights. After lecturing in Scottish, English, and American literature at the University of Strathclyde, Smith left academia due to chronic fatigue syndrome, an experience she has discussed publicly as pivotal in redirecting her focus toward writing. She returned to Cambridge to recuperate and has since made it her home, working as a full-time writer and contributing to The Guardian, The Scotsman, and Times Literary Supplement.

Smith's debut, "Free Love and Other Stories," received critical recognition, winning the Saltire First Book of the Year Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her subsequent novels, including "Hotel World," "The Accidental," and "Girl Meets Boy," are recognized for their innovative narrative structures and linguistic experimentation. "The Accidental" won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, while "Hotel World" earned the Encore Award and multiple Scottish Arts Council honors. Smith's work "Artful," based on lectures delivered at St Anne's College, Oxford, merges essay and fiction.

"How to Be Both" is a structurally innovative novel in which two narratives, separated by centuries and loosely connected by a Renaissance mural, can be read in either order. The book won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Smith followed this with the Seasonal Quartet—"Autumn," "Winter," "Spring," and "Summer"—a cycle of novels written in real time in response to events such as Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. "Autumn" was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and "Summer" won the Orwell Prize. Smith's work has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times.

Smith has continued to explore the boundaries of the novel form with projects such as "Gliff" and its companion novel "Glyph," a pair of interconnected homophone novels that examine themes of political repression, language, and resistance. "Gliff" was shortlisted for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize and the Highland Book Prize, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Smith has been recognized for her contributions to literature with honors including Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the Bodley Medal from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.