Smit Ali

Ali Smith is a British writer and journalist. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and a recipient of the Orwell Prize.

Ali Smith was born in Scotland, in Inverness, in 1962, into a working-class family with four other children besides Ali. She first studied in Aberdeen and then in Cambridge, where, upon graduating from university, she started work on a dissertation, but never completed it. After working briefly as a university lecturer, Ali Smith, in her own words, became fully convinced that she would never make a scholar. According to the writer, as soon as she entered a lecture hall, she began to feel physically unwell. As Janet Winterson wrote in her article about Ali Smith, “She gave up trying to teach other people's work and started to do her own.” Smith’s literary debut was the short-story collection Free Love and Other Stories (1995), which immediately received several literary awards in Scotland. From the earliest years of her writing career, short stories and novels have, as it were, competed with one another in Smith’s work. In addition, Ali Smith works actively as a journalist and contributes to The Scotsman and Times Literary Supplement.