Ali Smith

Standard Name: Smith, Ali
Birth Name: Alison Smith
Ali Smith is a contemporary Scottish author of fiction, drama, and criticism, remarkable for her love of wordplay and her exuberant writing style. Her short stories and novels contain many literary references, primed by Smith's background in academia, but also involve a fluid and far from academic approach to considerations of language, gender, and reality. Several of her works involve queer themes (a fair few of her characters, especially in her short fiction, appear genderless) and resituate the mythic, Gothic, and fantastic within modern Britain. Her latest works are especially noteworthy for their experiments with temporality.
Photograph of Ali Smith, seated at a table, with books, a water jug, and a cup in front of her. She appears to be at a book signing, and she is holding a pen in one hand, which is resting against her chin. She is wearing a white collared shirt dark rectangular-framed glasses, and her brown is shoulder-length with bangs.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Nan Shepherd
Unpublished poetry by NS is held in her archive at the National Library of Scotland , Manuscripts.27438-45. She disliked talking about her writing, and when asked about it she often deflected inquiries in an almost...
Textual Production Nell Dunn
A re-issue of 2018 contains an introduction by Ali Smith .
Textual Production Jeanette Winterson
Her contributors included Ali Smith on Beethoven 's Fidelio, Anne Enright on Dvorak 's Rusalka, Jackie Kay on Janacek 's The Makropulos Case, Joanna Trollope on Donizetti 's L'Elisir d'Amore, Kate Atkinson
Textual Production Jackie Kay
JK was one of twenty Scottish authors invited to contribute a monologue to a collaborative work entitled Dear Scotland, which was first performed by the Scottish National Theatre on 24 April 2014 as a...
Textual Production Jackie Kay
In 2016 JK worked on a project about people bearing the name of Smith, which arose from the band called The Smiths , so named by the singer Morrissey to give it a sense of...
Textual Production Winsome Pinnock
The National Theatre (Cottesloe) put on an arresting play for young people by WP entitled Can You Keep a Secret?, part of the New Connections season of plays for the young.
Launched a couple...
Textual Features Nan Shepherd
Her poetry, says Ali Smith , hymns the combination of nature and intellect, and engages passionately with the vastness, beauty, and ultimate indifference of rock, water, light, and air. Smith's words for the love-sonnets concluding...
Reception Nan Shepherd
NS 's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has been written by the practising Scottish novelist Ali Smith . In 2016 it was announced that her image had been chosen to appear on...
Reception Sylvia Townsend Warner
The collection was acclaimed. A critic in the Nation noted: Warner is a poet of great and consistent achievement.
Warner, Sylvia Townsend. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Selected Poems. Carcanet Press.
back cover
Other reviewers were equally enthusiastic, praising her craftsmanship, musical ear, and the great variety...
Publishing Leonora Carrington
The Hearing Trumpet has been published in several editions since the 1970s. The 1996 Exact Change edition is illustrated with line drawings by LC 's eldest son, Pablo Weisz Carrington , who also is an...
Occupation Liz Lochhead
In the last three of these jobs she was moving gradually further out from Glasgow proper. She did not enjoy school-teaching, and refers to herself as the most reluctant member of the Art Department.
Lochhead, Liz. True Confessions and New Clichés. Polygon Books.
1
Occupation Nan Shepherd
NS was quick-witted, jovial, and passionate about her craft: qualities that lent themselves naturally to teaching. She began lecturing in English at Aberdeen Training Centre for Teachers (later Aberdeen College of Education) in 1916, though...
Literary responses Nan Shepherd
Novelist Ali Smith wrote that this work was an enlightened fusion of philosophy and reportage on the forms and force of life everywhere in the beloved landscape.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Robert Macfarlane called it one of the most...
Literary responses Bernardine Evaristo
The cover bears an endorsement from Ali Smith .
Literary responses Leonora Carrington
In her 2005 introduction to the novel, Ali Smith quotes the seminal feminist work on LC 's creativity by art historian Whitney Chadwick : LChas rejected the ideals of youth and beauty that dominate...

Timeline

6 June 2013: Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo, in her...

Writing climate item

6 June 2013

Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo , in her early thirties, published a first novel, We Need New Names, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize.

Texts

Smith, Ali. “A & V at the V & A”. Road Stories, Faber & Faber, 2012.
Smith, Ali. “And Woman Created Woman: Carswell, Shepherd and Muir, and the Self-Made Woman”. Gendering the Nation: Studies in Modern Scottish Literature, edited by Christopher Whyte, Edinburgh University Press, 1995, pp. 25-47.
Smith, Ali, and Laura Paoletti. Antigone. Pushkin Children’s Books, 2013.
Smith, Ali. Artful. Hamish Hamilton, 2012.
Smith, Ali. Autumn. Pantheon Books, 2016.
Smith, Ali et al., editors. Brilliant Careers. Virago Press, 2000.
Smith, Ali. “Celebrating HG Wells’s role in the creation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights”. The Guardian.
Smith, Ali. “Cromarty and the Black Isle: Hugh Miller’s Voices”. The Guardian.
Smith, Ali. “Double Trouble: Helen Oyeyemi’s reworking of the doppelgänger myth, The Icarus Girl, is alive with ghosts”. theguardian.com.
Smith, Ali. Free Love and Other Stories. Virago, 1995.
Smith, Ali. Girl Meets Boy. Canongate, 2007.
Smith, Ali. “Greek Legend: Aliki Vougiouklaki”. Port Magazine.
Smith, Ali. “He looked like the finest man who ever lived”. The Observer.
Smith, Ali. Hotel World. Hamish Hamilton, 2001.
Smith, Ali. How To Be Both. Hamish Hamilton, 2014.
Smith, Ali, and Leonora Carrington. “Introduction”. The Hearing Trumpet, Penguin, 2005, p. v - xvi.
Smith, Ali et al. “Jose Saramago: A Celebration”. The Royal Society of Literature.
Smith, Ali. “Just”. Shell Connections 2005: New Plays for Young People, Faber and Faber, 2005, pp. 275-24.
Smith, Ali et al., editors. Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off. Penguin Books, 2009.
Smith, Ali. Like. Virago Press, 1997.
Smith, Ali. “Liz Lochhead: Speaking in Her Own Voice”. Liz Lochhead’s Voices, edited by Robert Crawford and Anne Varty, Edinburgh University Press, 1993, pp. 1-16.
Smith, Ali, and Tom Craig. “Morocco: The Pursuit of Happiness”. Writing on the Edge: Great Contemporary Writers on the Front Line of Crisis, edited by Dan Crowe, Rizzoli, pp. 143-65.
Smith, Ali. “My first book—a literary adventure”. Times, No. 68256, p. 8 [S2].
Litt, Toby, and Ali Smith, editors. New Writing 13. Picador, 2005.
Smith, Ali. “Once upon a life: Ali Smith”. The Guardian.