Ali Smith

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 to working class parents, and questions of class and of who counts as local run through her work. She read English at Aberdeen, started a doctorate on American and Irish modernism at Cambridge, and gave up lecturing at Strathclyde in 1992 through illness. Summer (2020) closes the Seasonal Quartet that began with Autumn, written and printed quickly enough to take in Brexit, the treatment of people held in immigration detention and the first pandemic spring; it won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Companion piece (2022) stands just outside the quartet: a narrator alone in lockdown, a phone call from someone she barely remembers, and a story from the Middle Ages that will not stay in its own century. Smith has four Booker shortlistings, and How to Be Both took both the Goldsmiths Prize and the Women's Prize.