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 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...
Literary responses Bernardine Evaristo
The cover bears an endorsement from Ali Smith .
Textual Production Nell Dunn
A re-issue of 2018 contains an introduction by Ali Smith .
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...
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...
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...

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.