Ali Smith

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Ali Smith is a writer, born in 1962 in Inverness, Scotland, to working class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a PHD that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at Strathclyde University to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. Openly gay, she has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 17 years and dedicates all her books to her.

Her fondness for the grandscale and her employment of shifting perspectives, formal risk-taking and rich language all mark Smith out as a "literary" writer, but her confident, inventive tales also display a humour which lightens the ambitious themes she covers. Her penchant for wordplay and the pleasure she takes in the outlandish and idiosyncratic have, however, given rise to the criticism that she can on occasion stray a little too far into the arch. Ali Smith's books are imbued with a perceptiveness that is acute and probing for all that it is gentle and compassionate.

[edit] Short story collections

The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003)
Other Stories and Other Stories (1999)
Free Love and Other Stories (1995), awarded the Saltire First Book of the Year award.

[edit] Novels

The Accidental (2004), shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and won the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year award.
Hotel World (2001), awarded the Encore Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the inaugural Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Like (1997).