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.

Connections

Connections Author name Sort descending Excerpt
Education Gillian Allnutt
Newnham, established in 1871 as a house in which young women could reside while attending lectures in Cambridge, was in 1971 one of the university's only three all-female colleges. (Since then Girton has begun to...
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...
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...
Textual Production Nell Dunn
A re-issue of 2018 contains an introduction by Ali Smith .
Literary responses Bernardine Evaristo
The cover bears an endorsement from Ali Smith .
Friends, Associates Jackie Kay
Her friendship with a gay man called Alastair Cameron began during her schooldays. She later became close to a Scottish writer of an older generation, Liz Lochhead , and liked and admired the yet more...
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...
Dedications Jackie Kay
JK titled her new poetry collection Fiere: a Scots word for friend or companion, familiar to many from Burns 's Auld Lang Syne. She dedicated it to Ali Smith .
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
Kay, Jackie. Fiere. Pan Macmillan Picador.
prelims
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
Literary responses Willa Muir
Thirty-seven years later, WM looked back at this first novel and felt it had enough material in it for two novels, which I was too amateurish to realize at the time.
Muir, Willa. Belonging. Hogarth Press.
163
The Glasgow Herald...
Literary responses Helen Oyeyemi
Reviewers lavished praise on The Icarus Girl, noting especially Oyeyemi's use of voice and perspective. Ali Smith called it a reworking of the doppelgänger myth, and wrote: Oyeyemi's childish, almost embarrassingly open prose style...
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...
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...
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...

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.