British · b. 1962
Ali Smith is an acclaimed Scottish writer regarded as one of the most inventive and admired novelists of her generation, celebrated for her playful, formally experimental fiction and the Booker-shortlisted Seasonal Quartet.
Ali Smith emerged as a distinctive voice with short stories and novels marked by wordplay, formal experiment, warmth, and intellectual curiosity. Her novels Hotel World and The Accidental were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Her Seasonal Quartet — Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer — written and published in near-real time, responded to contemporary Britain in the era of Brexit with remarkable immediacy, blending political urgency with art, history, and a generous humanism. How to Be Both won the Costa, Goldsmiths, and Baileys prizes.
Smith is celebrated for her inventiveness, her stylistic daring, and her ability to combine experimental form with genuine emotional and political resonance.
by Ali Smith
Two narratives, two times: a Renaissance fresco painter in 15th-century Ferrara; a contemporary Cambridge teenager grieving her mother. The two stories are printed in different orders in different editions — some readers encounter the Renaissance story first, others the contemporary one. The novel's question: how to be both past and present, both alive and dead.
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by Ali Smith
Elisabeth Demand, a young woman, visits Daniel Gluck, her hundred-year-old neighbour, who is dreaming in a care home. The novel moves between their past friendship and the present moment — post-Brexit Britain, 2016, a country divided in ways it cannot articulate. The first of the Seasonal Quartet.
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