Ali Smith

Ali Smith is a Scottish novelist, short-story writer and critic, one of the most inventive writers in English of her generation. Her works — including the Sequence novels Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, the formally daring How to Be Both and the essay-fiction Artful — are celebrated for their wordplay, political warmth and refusal of easy categories.

Born in Inverness and educated at Cambridge, Smith won the Goldsmiths Prize and multiple Costa prizes, and was shortlisted for the Booker three times. Her fiction ("The accident of language is the art of literature"), with its roots in modernism, queer time and current events, has made her a touchstone of serious contemporary literature and political imagination.