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
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 .
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...
Friends, Associates Sarah Waters
An interviewer reported that SWmoves in a circle of up-and-coming women writers, including Stella Duffy , Ali Smith , Charlotte Mendelson , and Joanna Briscoe .
McCrum, Robert. “What lies beneath”. Guardian.com.uk.
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...
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

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Smith, Ali. Other Stories and Other Stories. Granta Books, 1999.
Smith, Ali. “Portrait of My Father”. Granta, Vol.
104
, p. 36.
Smith, Ali. Public Library and Other Stories. Hamish Hamilton, 2015.
Smith, Ali. Shire. Full Circle Editions, 2013.
Smith, Ali. Spring. Hamish Hamilton, 2019.
Smith, Ali. The Accidental. Hamish Hamilton, 2005.
Smith, Ali. “The detainee’s tale by Ali Smith: ’I thought you would help me’”. The Guardian.
Smith, Ali. The First Person and Other Stories. Pantheon Books, 2008.
Smith, Ali et al. “The Green Stuff”. The Guardian.
Smith, Ali. The Seer. Faber & Faber, 2006.
Smith, Ali. The Whole Story and Other Stories. Hamish Hamilton, 2003.
Smith, Ali. There But For The. Penguin, 2011.
Smith, Ali. Winter. Hamish Hamilton, 2017.