Ali Smith is one of Britain’s most prominent current authors. She began her career with the short story collection Free Love and Other Stories in 1995, which established her as a pioneer in inventive, narratively experimental fiction.
Ali Smith: A Writer for all Seasons
Life
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in the north of Scotland on August 1962, to Ann and Donald Smith. She was the youngest of five children. Her father was an electrician and her mother worked as a bus conductor and she grew up in Inverness. The story of her parents meeting is told in her short story The Story of Folding and Unfolding. Deprived of education themselves, her parents determinedly steered their children towards higher education, with the professions firmly in mind; Ali was to be a lawyer.
She attended the University of Aberdeen studying literature where she won the University’s Bobby Aitken Memorial Prize for Poetry in 1984. From there it was on to Cambridge, studying for a PhD in American and Irish modernism, which she didn’t complete.
Smith moved to Edinburgh after this and worked as a lecturer in literature at the University of Strathclyde. Around this time her mother died and due to overworking she left the university in 1992 suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. It would take her many months to recover and she returned to Cambridge to recuperate.
She currently still lives in Cambridge with her long time partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.
Writing Career
While studying at Cambridge, Smith wrote several plays which were staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Cambridge Footlights. After some time working in Scotland, she returned to Cambridge to concentrate on her writing, in particular, focusing on short stories and freelancing as the fiction reviewer for The Scotsman newspaper. In 1995, she published her first book, Free Love and Other Stories, a collection of 12 short stories which won the Saltire First Book of the Year award and Scottish Arts Council Book Award.
Since then her work has ranged widely and experimentally, garnering numerous awards and prize nominations. Her books include: Hotel World, which was shortlisted both the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Accidental, shortlisted for the same two prizes, Girl Meets Boy (part of the Canongate Myths series), There But For The, and How to Be Both, which won the Baileys Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Folio Prize.
She is also an accomplished short story writer publishing collections such as Public Library in 2015, the Whole Story (2003)and The First Person (2008)
Smith’s most successful project was the “seasonal quartet” of novels Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. The Seasonal Quartet is a series of four stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are). A once-in-a-generation series, four wonderful novels about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now.
In 2022 she published Companion Piece again lighting a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms.
Coming soon in 2024 is her new novel Griff, which is the first installment of a new duology, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing.
Best Ali Smith Books to Read
Spring
Ali Smith’s Spring, the third installment in the novelist’s seasonal quartet, is somewhat about the weather but mostly about us. Like the previous novels in the series, Spring is steeped in contemporary politics. Vestiges of the Brexit vote that framed Autumn and the post-truth Trumpian state of Winter fold into Spring, which wrings out the messy, inhumane state of our world to look at humanity at its most vulnerable. The new novel responds to the current refugee crisis, specifically the thousands of people regularly detained in the United Kingdom’s “Immigration Removal Centres” (IRCs).
Free Love and Other Stories
A teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in Free Love are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith shows how things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us love and live differently.
Summer
In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world’s in meltdown – and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time.
This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they’ve got nothing in common have in common?
Summer.
How to be Both
How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s.
Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real – and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
Girl Meets Boy
Ali Smith’s brilliant retelling of Ovid’s gender-bending myth of Iphis and Ianthe, as seen through the eyes of two Scottish sisters. Girl Meets Boy is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, and the absurdity of consumerism, as well as a story of reversals and revelations that is as sharply witty as it is lyrical. Funny, fresh, poetic, and political, Girl Meets Boy is a myth of metamorphosis
If you enjoyed our profile of Ali Smith, check out Deborah Levy: The Woman Who Sees Everything
