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Unpublished poetry by NS is held in her archive at the National Library of Scotland , Manuscripts.27438-45.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 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 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 Nell Dunn
ND published a book about  anfriendship and and its relation to art and creativity, The Muse, with an endorsement from Ali Smith on its cover.
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 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

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.
Carrington, Leonora, and Ali Smith. The Hearing Trumpet. Penguin, 2005.
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.