Ali 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.

Milestones

24 August 1962

AS was born in Inverness, Scotland, the youngest in her family of five children by a considerable margin (her closest sibling having seven years on her).
Germanà, Monica, and Emily Horton, editors. Ali Smith. Bloomsbury.
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By 3 November 1995

AS 's first book, a collection entitled Free Love and Other Stories, was published by Virago Press . The book won that year's Saltire Literary Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book Award.
Germanà, Monica, and Emily Horton, editors. Ali Smith. Bloomsbury.
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“Ali Smith Wins the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction”. Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

By 20 May 2005

AS published the Whitbread Award-winning novel The Accidental, a tribute to cinematic storytelling which introduces a favourite Smith motif: the entry of a stranger into lives of ostensible bourgeois normalcy.
Germanà, Monica, and Emily Horton, editors. Ali Smith. Bloomsbury.
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Ratcliffe, Sophie. “Life in sonnet form”. The Times Literary Supplement, No. 5329, p. 19.
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28 August 2014

AS 's prize-winning novel How To Be Both was published by Hamish Hamilton , which managed to take it from receiving the manuscript to publication in the the abnormally short period of six weeks.
Armitstead, Claire. “Ali Smith, Interview”. theguardian.com.
Page, Benedicte. “Penguin prepares double edition of Ali Smith novel”. The Bookseller.

3 June 2015

How To Be Both was awarded the Bailey's Prize for Women's Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize for Fiction) at a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
Shaffi, Sarah. “Ali Smith wins Baileys Women’s Prize”. The Bookseller.

Biography

Birth and Childhood

24 August 1962

AS was born in Inverness, Scotland, the youngest in her family of five children by a considerable margin (her closest sibling having seven years on her).
Germanà, Monica, and Emily Horton, editors. Ali Smith. Bloomsbury.
xv