CANR
WORK TITLE: Gliff
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
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CITY: Cambridge, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Scottish
LAST VOLUME: LRC Aug 2021
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 24, 1962, in Inverness, Scotland; daughter of Donald and Ann Smith; partner of Sarah Wood, since c. 1993.
EDUCATION:University of Aberdeen, M.A. (with honors), 1984, M.Litt., 1985; graduate study at Newnham College, Cambridge.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Worked variously as a waitress, receptionist, advertising copywriter, tourism board assistant, and lettuce cleaner; University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, lecturer in Scottish, English, and American literature, 1990-92; freelance writer, 1992—.
AVOCATIONS:Cinema, music, art.
MEMBER:Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
AWARDS:Bobby Aitken Memorial Prize for poetry, University of Aberdeen, 1984; Saltire First Book of the Year award and Scottish Arts Council Book Award, for collection Free Love and Other Stories; Booker Prize shortlist, 2001, and United Kingdom’s Encore Award for outstanding second novel, 2002, Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, all for Hotel World; Whitbread Award for fiction, and Booker Prize shortlist, both 2005, both for The Accidental; Sundial Scottish Arts Council Novel of the Year award, 2006, for Girl Meets Boy; James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction, 2006, 2011; Claire Maclean Prize, 2008; Goldsmiths Prize shortlist, 2013, for Artful; Booker Prize shortlist, Goldsmiths Prize, Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and Costa Novel Prize, all 2014, all for How to Be Both; appointed Commander of the British Empire (CBE), 2015, for services to literature; European Literature Prize, 2020, for Spring; Orwell prize for political fiction, 2021, for Summer.
POLITICS: “Left.” RELIGION: Roman Catholic.WRITINGS
Author of the essay In the Spirit of Spark: The Muriel Spark Society Lecture, Polygon (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2018. Author of the plays “Stalemate,” 1986, “The Dance,” 1988, “Trace of Arc,” 1989, and “Comic,” 1990, all produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; and “Daughters of England,” 1989-90, and “Amazons,” 1990, both produced at Cambridge Footlights.
Contributor to anthologies, including The Vintage Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction, edited by Peter Kravitz, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1999; Mythic Women/Real Women: Plays and Performance Pieces by Women, Faber and Faber (London, England), 2000; The Children’s Hours: Stories of Childhood, Arcadia (London, England), 2009; Ox-Tales: Fire, GreenProfile (London, England), 2009; Park Stories, edited by Rowan Routh, Royal Parks (London, England), 2009; Why Willows Weep: Contemporary Tales from the Woods, edited by Tracy Chevalier, IndieBooks (London, England), 2011; Road Stories: New Writing Inspired by Exhibition Road, Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (London, England), 2012; Six Shorts, Sunday Times (London, England), 2013; Out There: An Anthology of Scottish LGBT Writing, edited by Zoë Strachan, Freight Books (Glasgow, Scotland), 2014; Refugee Tales, Vol. 1, Comma Press (Manchester, England), 2016; Scottish Stories, edited by Gerard Carruthers, Everyman’s Pocket Classics (New York, NY), 2023; and Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild and Untamed, Little, Brown (London, England), 2024. Contributor to periodicals, including European Review of Books, Guardian, Observer, Scotsman, Times Literary Supplement, and Visual Verse.
SIDELIGHTS
Ali Smith is a Scottish fiction writer whose work “consists of narrative nests, tales within tales,” according to London Review of Books critic Justine Jordan. Smith’s short-fiction collections and her first novel, Like, established her as a promising young author in the British Isles. According to Jordan, her short stories “refine the connections between action and import, moment and significance.” Between stories, novels, plays, and essays, Smith’s long and laureled career led up to her being appointed Commander of the British Empire for services to literature in 2015.
Smith’s story collections include Free Love and Other Stories, Other Stories and Other Stories, and Public Library and Other Stories. The author is particularly interested in tales that are “told by way of other stories,” and her second collection makes wide and inventive use of the narrative-within-a-narrative. Jordan wrote: “In most of Smith’s stories one event sets off a glancing chain of associations that lead to a new perspective on a universal fact and a sea-change for the narrator.” Jordan added: “At the same time, with their unresolved endings, inexplicable details and dropped stitches, these stories mimic the low-keyness of the real: the language is consciously unliterary, the subject matter is determinedly ordinary, recording the minor peaks of unremarkable lives—a holiday, a flirtation, the kindness of a stranger.” Jordan noted: “Every one of these stories is an accomplished miniature.”
Smith’s first novel, Like, has found readers in both the United Kingdom and North America. The multisectional tale revolves around three women: the emotionally and physically unsettled Amy Shone; Amy’s long-suffering daughter, Kate; and the vibrant Aisling McCarthy, whose passion for Amy has been a factor in the mother-daughter turmoil.
“The real treat here is … Smith’s mellifluous prose and wonderful rendering of the relationship between mother and daughter,” noted Barbara Hoffert in Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly contributor concluded: “Smith’s writing, at its strongest, is unhurried, perceptive, tender and graceful. This is a skillful portrayal of three unusual women who bring to their lives more questions than answers.” Jordan described Like as “richly allusive,” maintaining that the novel “is proof of [Smith’s] ability to retain the delicacy and precision of her short pieces in a more complex and extensive work.”
Smith’s next novel, Hotel World, was described as “a heartfelt and introspective ghost story” by Lisa Nussbaum in the Library Journal. The story revolves around the death of a chambermaid named Sara Wilby. As she narrates the story, Sara watches her own funeral and then hangs around the hotel trying to make sense out of life and death and commenting on a variety of characters.
“Hotel World is not a novel for reading in stolen snatches in public places,” warned Claudia FitzHerbert in the Spectator. “It demands first to be read aloud—there are voices which have to be heard to be heard—and then to be read again—the story, insofar as there is one, pulls you round in the sort of circle which only begins to take shape when you’ve walked it more than once.”
In her third novel, The Accidental, Smith tells the story of the upper-class British Smart family who spend a vacation in a less-than-ideal English countryside house. The family has more serious problems, however. The mother is a writer suffering from writer’s block, while her literature professor husband is cheating on her with his students. Teenage Magnus is guilty of committing a prank that led to a girl’s suicide, and his sister is disturbed by bullying at school. When Amber MacDonald shows up at the country house door one day, however, the Smart family undergoes a dramatic change.
Allison Block, writing in Booklist, called the novel “mesmerizing.” In a review in Entertainment Weekly, Jennifer Reese noted that the author “pulls it off with terrific pizzazz.” New Leader critic Tova Reich particularly enjoyed “Smith’s dazzling verbal display.”
Smith presents twelve short stories in her collection The Whole Story and Other Stories. Her tales include an encounter with death in the form of a BBC newsman, a woman falling in love with a tree, and two women getting kicked out of church on Christmas Eve.
Referring to the collection as “playful and imaginative,” Hollins Critic contributor Kelly Cherry remarked: “In direct, conversational sentences, the stories seem to spin themselves out effortlessly, expertly moving through a range of emotions and taking us to unforeseen places or conclusions.” Cherry went on to call Smith “an excitingly unrestrained writer, smart and engaging.” Spectator contributor Andrew Hedgecock concluded: “There is much to admire in these eccentric and complex stories in which the quotidian teeters on the brink of enchantment, chaos and despair.”
In 2007 Smith published Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis. The book presents ancient Greek myths set to modern times and ageless themes, based on the story of Iphis and Ianthe. Here, Anthea becomes involved with gender-ambiguous Robin in Inverness, Scotland, while working for the multinational Pure corporation.
A contributor to Adventures in Reading noted: “The end of the book is sensational and develops the idea of metamorphosis as not only being personal but also being political and social. So far I absolutely adore this series and cannot wait to pick up another.” Camilla Pia, reviewing the book on the List website, found that “humour and Smith’s spirited prose style are both redeeming features in this latest of Canongate’s ‘Myth’ series.” A contributor to the Complete Review website observed that the book “often sparkles. Smith presents the voices … pitch-perfectly, down to Midge’s almost timidly parenthetical thoughts. There’s also a lot of very clever stuff here, too, including the hilarious marketing-speak at Pure … and Iphisol’s sloganeering. Smith does a pretty nice love story, too, and her playing with language is thoroughly enjoyable throughout.” The same contributor commented: “There are some sympathetic male figures, but they’re definitely the exception. And the emphasis is definitely not on their maleness, the sympathetic men all having embraced their feminine sides.” The contributor concluded: “ Girl Meets Boy is a clever and often very enjoyable read, and for the most part Smith makes her important points quite well. Too bad she ultimately overdoes it with the sexism, undermining her message. Still: well worthwhile.”
Elena Seymenliyska, writing in the London Telegraph, found that “Smith takes this classic myth about the transformative power of love and turns it into a modern-day story of corporate, personal and sexual rebellion.” Molly Guiness, a contributor to the Spectator, described the book as “a clever use of the myth,” adding: “Ali Smith has delivered another exuberant cascade of words; the romance is described in a lyrical flood and Imogen’s part is dealt with mainly in accomplished streams of consciousness. The heterosexual romance that appears as a subplot is delineated with psychological acumen; the interest of the homosexual one is rather a type of sub-poetic torrent describing mutual bliss.” Meghan Ward, reviewing the book in the San Francisco Chronicle, stated: “A short, fun read, Girl Meets Boy is full of pop culture references such as Facebook, MySpace, and Google, constant reminders that our identity, politics, and imagination are bound by our social mores, not by our Olympian gods.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly remarked that “Smith’s cadences, which read like classical drama, carry the novel along beautifully.”
Smith’s next novel, There but for The, is told in four different parts, narrated by four different characters. A man named Miles is invited as a casual acquaintance to a dinner party in Greenwich, New York. During the desert course, for reasons that are never explained, Miles quietly barricades himself in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs and refuses to come out for several months. The rest of the novel is told by and about casual acquaintances of Miles.
Reviewing the work in the Telegraph, contributor Lucy Daniel summarized: “Here are certain recurring Ali Smith scenarios and character types: a funny, clever kid with a snappy way with words; a meeting with one’s former self; the insolent dead who won’t keep quiet; the uninvited guest who descends, Mary-Poppins-like, into the lives of others, and leaves them changed.” London Observer contributor Sarah Churchwell commented: “If some of the set-pieces are less successful than others—the novel’s central dinner party descends from burlesque into caricature, as the guests became increasingly loathsome—there are some wonderful disquisitions on our cultural idiosyncrasies.” New York Times Book Review contributor Charles McGrath said of the work: “The main web we have for holding experience together, the novel suggests—for recreating a past in the present—is language itself, which in Ms. Smith’s hands seems at times to be arbitrary and insubstantial: the stuff of jokes and puns, the airy lightness that keeps her little construct aloft. Yet language here also proves itself to be dense and referential, capable of making unexpected connections and of imprinting itself feelingly on the mind in a phrase, a rhyme, a snatch of song lyric.”
With her novel How to Be Both, Smith presents a genre-defying tale that follows George, a sixteen-year-old girl in the twenty-first century, and Francescho, the ghost of a dead artist from the fifteenth century. The tales are interrelated, but some editions of How to Be Both begin with George’s story and end with Francescho’s, while others are published in the reverse order. George is living in Cambridge in 2014, and she is mourning the death of her mother. George reflects on their last summer together, and she remembers going to see a renaissance fresco painted by Francescho. The ghost of the artist spies on George as she looks at her long-ago work and this serves as the opening for reflections on the artist’s life and work.
How to Be Both was widely lauded by critics, and it won a Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Prize. According to Washington Post Book World correspondent Ron Charles, “Smith’s playfully brilliant new novel makes me both excited and wary of recommending it. This gender-blending, genre-blurring story, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bounces across centuries, tossing off profound reflections on art and grief, without getting tangled in its own postmodern wires. It’s the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don’t seem entirely possible.” Charles added: “This sounds like a novel freighted with postmodern gimmicks, but Smith knows how to be both fantastically complex and incredibly touching. Just as Francescho’s story is laced with insights about the nature and power of painting, George’s story offers its own tender exploration of the baffling and clarifying power of grief.” Sophie Gilbert, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, was also impressed, noting: “As Francescho crafts worlds and characters and stories from the raw materials of paint and canvas, Smith does the same in her chosen medium. What matters, she seems to say, is not so much how and why her characters come together, but rather the enduring impression that each is able to imprint upon the other, and upon the reader.” Offering applause in his Telegraph review, Patrick Flanery stated: “The pain of mourning and loss is seared into the lives of Smith’s two motherless heroines, but despite the novel’s refusal of consolation and the profound seriousness of the questions it explores, How to Be Both brims with palpable joy, not only at language, literature, and art’s transformative power, but at the messy business of being human, of wanting to be more than one kind of person at once. The possibilities unleashed by the desire to be neither one thing nor the other means that one may ever and always strive to be both. With great subtlety and inventiveness, Smith continues to expand the boundaries of the novel.”
Public Library and Other Stories, published in 2016, is a “collection of thoughtful, sensitive, imaginative, and acidly funny short stories about characters besotted by language and books,” commented Booklist contributor Donna Seaman. In these stories, books form the bridge between the past and the present, between parents and children, and between a person’s interior landscape and the world around them. The female protagonist of “Good Voice” finds a connection between herself and her father using a book of poems by Wilfred Owen, a poet who wrote about World War I. “The Poet” presents biographical information on Scottish poet Olive Fraser, who was published after her death. Fraudulent credit card charges and intense interest in the fate of the ashes of D.H. Lawrence occupy the narrator of “The Human Claim.” In another story, the uncommon word “sepulchral” forms a touchstone for the relationship of a divorced couple. Along with the stories, Smith includes short essays from a selection of colleagues and fellow writers, including Kate Atkinson and Helen Oyeyemi, on their relationship with their public library and their memories of this public yet, to a reader, deeply personal space.
Reviewing Public Library and Other Stories, a Publishers Weekly writer concluded, “This is a valiant project that depicts the everyday joy of books and makes a passionate plea for their preservation.” A writer in Bookseller found it to be a “vibrant, loving tribute to libraries.”
With her novel Autumn, Smith begins a proposed four-part sequence based on the seasons of the year. The book presents the story of a “charming friendship between a lonely girl and a kind older man who offers her a world of culture,” commented Barbara Love, writing in Library Journal. When she was a small child, Elisabeth Demand was frequently ignored, if not neglected, by her mother. Many times, the lonely girl ended up in the company of an older neighbor, Daniel Gluck, who became a sort of unofficial caretaker and guardian for her. Daniel was charming and sophisticated, clearly highly literate and well educated. He was also an escapee from World War II Germany, with painful memories of that period and of the people, particularly his little sister, who had to be left behind. Elisabeth’s mother had little good to say about Daniel, but she was still willing to turn over a large part of her childcare duties to him. Over the years, Elisabeth and Daniel’s friendship blossomed heartily, as Daniel introduced her to the intellectual joys of literature, puns, art, and the power of storytelling.
Many years on, Daniel is a feeble centenarian, only partially aware of his surroundings and nearing the end of his life in a nursing home. Throughout the narrative, Smith portrays some of Daniel’s internal visions as he floats in and out of consciousness. Almost hallucinations, these vivid waking dreams reveal even more about his past and his personality. Elisabeth, in her early thirties, has become a lecturer and art historian at a London-based university. Elisabeth is pained to see her lifelong friend in such a weakened condition. She visits him frequently and reads to him, helping to keeping him company and making his final days easier. The deep and simple friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel is set in counterpoint to the turmoil of modern England in the wake of the controversial Brexit vote. A nightmarish encounter with bureaucracy when she tries to renew her passport also demonstrates how the worst aspects of the world compare with the purity of her friendship with Daniel.
Smith “deftly juxtaposes her protagonists’ physical and emotional states in the past and present,” remarked a Publishers Weekly writer. Spectator reviewer Kate Webb observed, “It is clear that Smith is emphasizing the delight and openness of art, its ability to hearten and fortify us in difficult times.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor commented that Autumn “is a kaleidoscope whose suggestive fragments and insights don’t easily render a pleasing pattern, yet it’s compelling in its emotional and historical freight, its humor, and keen sense of creativity and loss.” Cortney Ophoff, writing in Booklist, called Smith’s novel “delightfully cerebral and relevant.” BookPage reviewer Harvey Freedenberg concluded, “Impressionistic in character, it’s a book to be read less for any conventional plot than for its skill in stimulating a reflective mood.”
Winter, the second book of the series, centers on some family encounters during a Christmas season at a posh manor house in Cornwall. Sophia, a former business professional, lives alone in the multi-room home. She anticipates a visit from Art, her son, and Art’s girlfriend Charlotte. Unfortunately, Art and Charlotte have recently split up, and he is not sure how this will affect his holiday at home. Though Art had some success as a nature blogger, Charlotte had finally grown tired of his insincerity and frequent pomposity. Finally, Art pays another woman, Lux, a woman he meets at a bus stop, to impersonate Charlotte. Though his mother is aged and hard to deal with, he believes she will not be able to see through the ruse. The difficult holiday gathering is made even more bothersome by Charlotte’s sister and Art’s aunt Iris, who brings up unpleasant memories from their past. Tense political talk adds to the misery. By the end, however, the bewildered outsider Lux has managed to move the fractured family toward a reconciliation.
A Publishers Weekly writer called Winter an “engaging novel due to the ecstatic energy of Smith’s writing, which is always present on the page.” New Statesman contributor Francesca Wade observed, “Smith’s voice, so wise and joyful, is the perfect antidote to troubled times: raw and bitter in the face of injustice, yet always alive to hope, however slight.”
Considered one of the first novels to address the COVID-19 pandemic, Summer concludes Smith’s seasonal quartet. The book finds teenager Sacha Greenlaw in spring 2020 thinking through the initial phases of the coronavirus pandemic as the world is on the brink of extreme upheaval. She contemplates the virus, how it originated, the history of plagues, and masking. Robert, Sascha’s thirteen-year-old brother, is struggling with his emerging identity and idolizes both Albert Einstein and Boris Johnson. Grace, the siblings’ single mother, reflects on the past, when her life was simpler and she was an actress. As each family member is in the midst of personal change, Smith weaves in the myriad ways in which the world around them is evolving. Summer incorporates characters from Smith’s previous novels in the quartet, such as Daniel, Charlotte, and Art. Additionally, Smith integrates themes from the earlier works, including the migrant crisis, Brexit, climate change, activism, and art.
Critics praised Summer for its timeliness and deftly connected themes. A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked that Summer is “a deeply resonant finale to a work that should come to be recognized as a classic.” The same reviewer felt that the novel is “wonderfully entertaining … and a reminder … that everything and everyone truly is connected.” In a New Statesman review of the novel, Johanna Thomas-Corr noted the relevancy of the novel, stating “there is something about the antic spirit of these novels that mimics the unruliness of our age.” In the Times Literary Supplement, Ben Masters felt that Summer stood out among other titles in Smith’s quartet. Masters enthused: “ Summer is a superb novel, the standout season, and it mostly dispels the uneven weather. A virtuoso individual, it is also a conscientious team player, at last bringing the narratives of the Seasonal novels—which have for the most part appeared to be stand-alone stories—together.” “At once tolerant and critical, generous and exacting, this novel is in its very form an implicit defence of otherness and difference; it enacts values that need championing now as much as ever. In a challenging season, we should be thankful for an idiosyncratically Smithian Summer,” concluded Masters.
[open new]Foregrounding wordplay with a title that seems to wryly assign minor status to the work, or else highlights the theme of companionship—or both—is Smith’s follow-up to her seasonal quartet, Companion Piece, set in a time (or two) of plague. Mired in the doldrums of the COVID-19 pandemic, painter Sandy Gray has little to do besides chat with the mythical Cerberus while her hospitalized father’s dog looks on. But one night old schoolmate Martina Pelf, out of touch for thirty years, calls the reputedly wide-open-minded Sandy hoping to get some feedback about a bizarre experience: returning from a trip to collect a sixteenth-century artifact, the Boothby Lock, for the museum where she works, Martina was caught up in border security and ended up in an interview room where a disembodied voice asked her to choose between “curlew and curfew.” Cue the chaos of the Pelf family ignoring lockdown and lock drama alike to invade the curious Sandy’s house, and the appearance of a curlew—a bird—in the company of a homeless girl who breaks in. As a fabular narrative detour suggests, the girl may be the reincarnation of a medieval blacksmith’s apprentice whose promising life turned forboding when her master passed away. Sandy, narrating, is compelled by the riddle and ready to bring some reasonability back into her life.
Reviewers marveled at the deftness with which Smith intertwines reality and myth in Companion Piece. In the Washington Post Ellen Akins observed that the Cerberus set-up leaves readers “prepared for a modicum of magic from the start,” and the narrative proceeds to reveal, in the words of New Statesman reviewer Andrew Marr, a “world of magic and anarchic art half-buried in banal daily life.” Akins described Smith’s pandemic-era world as “all-too-familiar territory that Smith characteristically renders wonderfully strange” and appreciated how the “accumulating Pelfs … give the book a funny farcical momentum, against which Companion Piece‘s other stories incidentally unfold.” A Kirkus Reviews writer appreciated Smith’s “ingenuity in pulling together disparate narrative strands.” Akins especially appreciated how the narrating Sandy is “alive to the music and light of language, whether she’s parsing an E. E. Cummings poem for Martina or explaining the etymology of a word like curfew or making sly allusions or silly puns.”
Marr was led by Companion Piece and the sustained ingenuity of Smith’s oeuvre to characterize her as not so much a mere novelist but rather a “one-woman fictional campaign.” Marr associates her with those early twentieth century modernists—Joyce, Woolf, Stein—who sought to “re-enchant daily life, to bring back the magic they felt was being lost” in civilized life. He added that her “way of telling a story—looping in time; switching from one fast-flicking consciousness to another; tying up radically different periods of history in a single place—and her amused delight in the flexibilities of language feel not only modernist but, better than that, modern.” The Kirkus Reviews writer aptly concluded that “with art and humor, Ali is the smith who forges links for her idiosyncratic narrative,” which proves a “truly marvelous tale of pandemic … puns and endurance.”
Reality tilts dystopian in Gliff, set in a near future where surveillance, conformity, and reeducation have been cranked up to ten. Eleven-year-old Rose and her older sibling Briar are left to their own devices when first their mother leaves town, reportedly to care for an ailing aunt, and then her partner Leif follows hoping to retrieve her. The red circle drawn around their house is a clue, and after Rose befriends a horse named Gliff, while Briar communes with savvy old woman Oona, they fall in with an off-the-grid group squatting in an abandoned school. The siblings’ mother, it turns out, turned whistleblower at a weed-killing conglomerate, leaving the family branded as Unverifiables and the children drifting unanchored into the future.
A Publishers Weekly writer lauded Gliff as “extraordinary” and “ingenious,” with the siblings’ youthful perspective bringing a “sense of wonder, inquisitiveness, and pathos to the story.” Thematically the reviewer appreciated the underlying “anthem of resistance … against tyranny and the destruction of the environment.” In the Spectator, Francesca Peacock found “much to like about Smith’s impressionistic style: she wonderfully conveys the children’s perspective, and her characteristic linguistic experimentation is on full display.” Peacock found a few narrative “holes” in Gliff but acknowledged that it represents the first half of a diptych, with the follow-up, Glyph, billed as telling “a story which is hidden in the first.” A Kirkus Reviews writer hailed Smith’s “gift for conveying a fizzily fresh and vibrant young person’s mind” and found in Gliff a “dark vision brightened by the engaging craft of an inventive writer.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Germanà, Monica, and Emily Horton, eds., Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Bloomsbury (London, England), 2013.
Lojo Rodríguez, Laura Ma, Moving across a Century: Women’s Short Fiction from Virginia Woolf to Ali Smith, Peter Lang (Bern, Switzerland), 2012.
Young, Emma, Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Short Stories, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Atlantic Monthly, December 3, 2014, Sophie Gilbert, review of How to Be Both; February 15, 2017, Sophie Gilbert, “Ali Smith’s Autumn Is a Post- Brexit Masterpiece,” review of Autumn.
Booklist, December 1, 2005, Allison Block, review of The Accidental, p. 27; September 15, 2016, Donna Seaman, review of Public Library and Other Stories, p. 24; January 1, 2017, Cortney Ophoff, review of Autumn, p. 33.
BookPage, February, 2017, Harvey Freedenberg, review of Autumn, p. 23.
Bookseller, June 7, 2002, “Scottish Arts Council Picks 15,000 Pounds Sterling Winners,” p. 6; February 17, 2006, “Bestseller by Design: There Has Been Nothing Accidental about the Sales of Ali Smith’s Latest Novel,” p. 15; November 20, 2015, review of Public Library and Other Stories, p. 21.
Entertainment Weekly, January 13, 2006, Jennifer Reese, review of The Accidental, p. 83.
Europe Intelligence Wire, March 7, 2006, “Inverness Author Ali in Line for Top Prize”; May 4, 2006, “Author Showcases New Comedy,” and “Scots Writer Takes Comedy of Manners Back Home in Style.”
Guardian (London, England), December 8, 2007, Ursula K. Le Guin, review of Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis.
Hollins Critic, February, 2006, Kelly Cherry, review of The Whole Story and Other Stories.
Independent (London, England), October 28, 2007, Catherine Taylor, review of Girl Meets Boy; November 23, 2007, Stevie Davies, review of Girl Meets Boy; June 10, 2011, Arifa Akbar, review of There but for The.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2003, review of The Whole Story and Other Stories, p. 1421; October 15, 2007, review of Girl Meets Boy; November 15, 2012, review of Artful; November 15, 2016, review of Autumn; July 15, 2020, review of Summer; April 1, 2022, review of Companion Piece; October 15, 2024, review of Gliff.
Library Journal, July, 1998, Barbara Hoffert, review of Like, p. 138; December, 2001, Lisa Nussbaum, review of Hotel World, p. 176; November 1, 2007, Joy Humphrey, review of Girl Meets Boy, p. 61; December 1, 2016, Barbara Love, review of Autumn, p. 92.
London Review of Books, July 1, 1999, Justine Jordan, review of Other Stories and Other Stories, p. 33.
Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2008, review of Girl Meets Boy.
New Leader, November-December, 2005, Tova Reich, review of The Accidental, p. 45.
New Statesman, December 6, 2007, Tadzio Koelb, review of Girl Meets Boy; September 11, 2006, “The NS Guide to Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” p. 55; August 29, 2014, Frances Wilson, “Art and Its Double,” p. 39; November 10, 2017, Francesca Wade, “Cold Comfort,” review of Winter, p. 45; August 21, 2020, Johanna Thomas-Corr, “Writing for an Unruly Age: Ali Smith’s Experiments in Fast Fiction,” review of Summer, p. 44; April 22, 2022, Andrew Marr, review of Companion Piece, p. 42.
New York Times Book Review, October 18, 2011, Charles McGrath, review of There but for The; May 29, 2022, Mohsin Hamid, review of Companion Piece, p. 9.
Observer (London, England), October 28, 2007, Kirsty Gunn, review of Girl Meets Boy; June 5, 2011, Sarah Churchwell, review of There but for The.
Publishers Weekly, July 20, 1998, review of Like, p. 209; March 1, 2004, review of The Whole Story and Other Stories, p. 51; September 12, 2005, “Man Booker Nominees,” p. 8; October 1, 2007, review of Girl Meets Boy, p. 36; August 29, 2016, review of Public Library and Other Stories, p. 62; December 19, 2016, review of Autumn, p. 91; November 27, 2017, review of Winter, p. 30; September 30, 2024, review of Gliff, p. 32.
San Francisco Chronicle, January 6, 2008, Meghan Ward, review of Girl Meets Boy, p. M3.
Spectator, October 13, 2001, Claudia FitzHerbert, review of Hotel World, p. 60; May 3, 2003, Andrew Hedgecock, review of The Whole Story and Other Stories, p. 40; October 31, 2007, Molly Guiness, review of Girl Meets Boy; November 19, 2016, Kate Webb, review of Autumn, p. 44; November 4, 2017, Helen R. Brown, review of Winter; November 2, 2024, Francesca Peacock, review of Gliff, p. 44.
Telegraph (London, England), October 20, 2007, Elena Seymenliyska, review of Girl Meets Boy; May 24, 2011, Lucy Daniel, review of There but for The; October 14, 2014, Patrick Flanery, review of How to Be Both.
Times (London, England), November 11, 2007, Hugo Barnacle, review of Girl Meets Boy.
Times Literary Supplement, November 9, 2007, Alex Clark, review of Girl Meets Boy, p. 21; August 7, 2020, Ben Masters, review of Summer, p. 18; November 15, 2024, Nat Segnit, review of Gliff, p. 19.
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 22, 2007, review of The Accidental, p. 12.
Washington Post Book World, February 26, 2006, Jeff Turrentine, review of The Accidental, p. 8; December 2, 2014, Ron Charles, review of How to Be Both; May 4, 2022, Ellen Akins, review of Companion Piece.
ONLINE
Adventures in Reading, http://bookchronicle.wordpress.com/ (December 31, 2007), review of Girl Meets Boy.
British Council, http:// literature.britishcouncil.org/ (August 23, 2021), critical biography of Ali Smith.
Collected Miscellany, http://collectedmiscellany.com/ (February 12, 2008), Kevin Holtsberry, review of Girl Meets Boy.
Complete Review, http: //www.complete-review.com/ (August 18, 2008), review of Girl Meets Boy.
Edinburgh International Book Festival, http:// www.edbookfest.co.uk/ (August 23, 2021), biography of Ali Smith.
Foyles, http:// www.foyles.co.uk/ (February 8, 2017), biography of Ali Smith; Frances Gertler, author interview.
List, http:// www.list.co.uk/ (November 1, 2007), Camilla Pia, review of Girl Meets Boy.
Short Review, http:// www.theshortreview.com/ (August 18, 2008), author profile.
Straits Times, https:/ /www.straitstimes.com/ (November 14, 2020), Olivia Ho, review of Summer.*
Ali Smith
Scotland (b.1962)
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Smith writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman and the TLS.
Awards: Orwell (2021), Women's Prize (2015), Goldsmiths (2014), Costa (2014) see all
Genres: Literary Fiction, Children's Fiction, Fantasy
New and upcoming books
October 2024
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Gliff
(Gliff, book 1)September 2025
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Glyph
(Gliff, book 2)
Series
Seasonal Quartet
1. Autumn (2016)
2. Winter (2017)
3. Spring (2019)
4. Summer (2020)
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Gliff
1. Gliff (2024)
2. Glyph (2025)
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Novels
Like (1997)
Hotel World (2001)
The Accidental (2005)
There but for the (2011)
How to be both (2014)
Companion Piece (2022)
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Collections
Free Love and Other Stories (1998)
Other Stories and Other Stories (1999)
The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003)
Writ (2006)
The First Person (2008)
Road Stories (2012) (with others)
Six Shorts (2013) (with others)
Shire (2013)
Public Library and Other Stories (2015)
Scottish Stories: Everyman Pocket Classics (2023) (with others)
Furies (2023) (with others)
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Anthologies edited
Brilliant Careers (2000) (with Kasia Boddy and Sarah Wood)
Shorts (2000)
Mays 2003 (2003)
New Writing: No. 13 (2005) (with Toby Litt)
The Reader (2006)
The Book Lover (2008)
Let's Call the Whole Thing Off (2009) (with Kasia Boddy and Sarah Wood)
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Series contributed to
Myths
7. Girl Meets Boy (2007)
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Ox-Tales
Ox-Tales: Fire (2009) (with others)
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Park Stories
5. The Definite Article (2009)
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Elsewhere
1. Here (2012) (with others)
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Save the Story
1. The Story of Antigone (2013)
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Plays hide
The Seer (2006)
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Non fiction hide
Artful (2012)
In the Spirit of Spark (2018)
Ali Smith
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other people named Ali Smith, see Ali Smith (disambiguation).
Ali Smith
CBE FRSL
Smith signing books at Edinburgh International Book Festival
Smith signing books at Edinburgh International Book Festival
Born 24 August 1962 (age 62)
Inverness, Scotland
Occupation Author, playwright, academic, journalist
Nationality Scottish
Alma mater University of Aberdeen
Newnham College, Cambridge
Period 1986–present
Partner Sarah Wood
Ali Smith CBE FRSL (born 24 August 1962) is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting".[1]
Early life and education
Smith was born in Inverness on 24 August 1962 to Ann and Donald Smith. Her parents were working-class[2] and she was raised in a council house in Inverness.[3][4] From 1967 to 1974 she attended St. Joseph's RC Primary school, then went on to Inverness High School, leaving in 1980.[5][6]
She studied a joint degree in English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen from 1980 to 1985, coming first in her class in 1982 and gaining a top first in Senior Honours English in 1984.[7] She won the University's Bobby Aitken Memorial Prize for Poetry in 1984.[5]
From 1985 to 1990 she attended Newnham College, Cambridge, studying for a PhD in American and Irish modernism. During her time at Cambridge, she began writing plays and as a result, did not complete her doctorate.[5][8]
Smith moved to Edinburgh from Cambridge in 1990 and worked as a lecturer in Scottish, English and American literature at the University of Strathclyde.[6] She left the university in 1992 because she was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. She returned to Cambridge to recuperate.[5][8]
As a young woman, Smith held several part-time jobs including a waitress, lettuce-cleaner, tourist board assistant, receptionist at BBC Highland and advertising copywriter.[5]
Career
While studying for her PhD 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, focussing on short stories and freelancing as the fiction reviewer for The Scotsman newspaper.[5] 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.[9]
She writes articles for The Guardian, The Scotsman, New Statesman and The Times Literary Supplement.[10]
In 2009, she donated the short story Last (previously published in the Manchester Review online) to Oxfam's "Ox-Tales" project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the "Fire" collection.[11]
Personal life
Smith lives in Cambridge with her partner, filmmaker Sarah Wood.[12][13]
Awards and honours
In 2007, Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature[14] She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature.[15][16]
An honorary doctorate (D.Litt) was awarded to her by Newcastle University in 2019.[17]
In 2024 she was awarded the Bodley Medal for contributions to literature, the highest honour of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.[18]
Literary awards
Year Published Work Award Category Result Ref
2001 Hotel World Booker Prize — Shortlisted [19]
Encore Award — Won
SMIT Book of the Year Award Book of the Year Won
Fiction Won
Women's Prize for Fiction — Shortlisted
2005 The Accidental Booker Prize — Shortlisted
Costa Book Awards Novel Won
Women's Prize for Fiction — Shortlisted
2007 Girl Meets Boy Diva magazine readers' choice Book of the Year Won [20]
Sundial Scottish Arts Council Novel of the Year Won [21]
2012 There But For The Hawthornden Prize — Won [22]
James Tait Black Memorial Prize — Shortlisted [23]
SMIT Book Awards Fiction Won [24]
Women's Prize for Fiction — Longlisted [25]
2013 Artful Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize — Won
Goldsmiths Prize — Shortlisted [26][27]
SMIT Book Awards Fiction Shortlisted
2014 How to Be Both Booker Prize — Shortlisted [28]
Costa Book Awards Novel Won [29]
Goldsmiths Prize — Won [30][31]
2015 Folio Prize — Shortlisted [32]
Women's Prize for Fiction — Won [33]
2016 Autumn Booker Prize — Shortlisted [34]
2020 Spring Europese Literatuurprijs — Won [35]
2020 Summer Orwell Prize — Won [36]
Works
Novels
Like (1997)
Hotel World (2001)
The Accidental (2005)
Girl Meets Boy (2007)
There But For The (2011)
Artful (2012)
How to Be Both (2014)
Autumn (2016)
Winter (2017)
Spring (2019)
Summer (2020)
Companion Piece (2022)
Gliff (2024)
Glyph (forthcoming 2025)
Short story collections
Free Love and Other Stories (1995), awarded the Saltire First Book of the Year award and Scottish Arts Council Book Award.[9]
Other Stories and Other Stories (1999)[19]
The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003)[19]
The First Person and Other Stories (2008)[37]
Public Library and Other Stories (2015)
Plays
Stalemate (1986), unpublished, produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe[5][6]
The Dance (1988), unpublished, produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe[5][6]
Trace of Arc (1989), produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe[5]
Daughters of England (1989-1990), unpublished, Cambridge Footlights[38]
Amazons (1990), Cambridge Footlights[5]
Comic (1990), unpublished, produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe[5][6]
The Seer (2001)[39]
Just (2005)[39]
Other
Shire (2013), with images by Sarah Wood: short stories and autobiographical writing. Full Circle Editions.
Other projects
This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous.
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Ali Smith partnered with the Scottish band Trashcan Sinatras and wrote the lyrics to a song called "Half An Apple", a love song about keeping half an apple spare for a loved one who is gone. The song was released on 5 March 2007, on the album Ballads of the Book.[4]
In 2008, Smith produced The Book Lover, a collection of her favourite writing, including pieces from Sylvia Plath, Muriel Spark, Grace Paley, and Margaret Atwood. It also includes work from writers such as Joseph Roth and Clarice Lispector.[40]
In 2008, Smith contributed the short story "Writ" to an anthology supporting Save the Children. The anthology is entitled The Children's Hours and was published by Arcadia Books. Foreign editions have been published in Portugal, Italy, China and Korea.
In 2011 she wrote a short memoir for The Observer in their "Once upon a life" series: "Looking back on her life, writer Ali Smith returns to the moment of conception to weave a poignant and funny memoir of an irreverent father, a weakness for Greek musicals and a fateful border crossing."[41]
In October 2011, Smith published The Story of Antigone, a retelling of the classic created by Sophocles. It is part of the "Save the stories" series by Pushkin Children’s Books and is illustrated by Laura Paoletti.[42]
In October 2012, Smith read a sermon at Manchester Cathedral to guests and students, followed by a book signing.[43]
In 2013, Smith published Artful, a book based on her lectures on European comparative literature delivered the previous year at St Anne's College, Oxford. Artful was well-received, with one reviewer commenting that, "...her new book, in which she tugs at God’s sleeve, ruminates on clowns, shoplifts used books, dabbles in Greek and palavers with the dead, is a stunner."[44]
On 14 May 2013, Smith gave the National Centre for Writing's inaugural Harriet Martineau lecture, in celebration of Norwich, UNESCO's 2012 City of Literature.[45]
Smith is also a patron of the Visual Verse online anthology and her piece "Untitled", written in response to an image by artist Rupert Jessop, appears in the November 2014 edition.[46]
On 10 September 2015, Smith was nominated Honorary Fellow by Goldsmiths, University of London.[47]
In 2011, she contributed the short story "Scots Pine (A Valediction Forbidding Mourning)" to Why Willows Weep, an anthology supporting The Woodland Trust. The paperback edition was released in 2016.[48]
In July 2016, Smith was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia.[49]
Smith is a patron of Refugee Tales.[50] In 2016, Smith's story "The Detainee's Tale" was published by Comma Press in Refugee Tales Volume 1.[51]
In May 2021, Smith contributed a short story entitled "The final frontier" to a newborn magazine, The European Review of Books.[52][53]
COMPANION PIECEBy Ali Smith
In a pandemic-ravaged and post-Brexit Britain, our narrator, Sandy Gray, who is anything but gray, character-wise, though in her present state of personal and political despondency she might well feel she is, receives an unexpected call from one Martina Pelf, formerly Martina Inglis, a university acquaintance who has recently been held for seven and a half hours at border control, an officer annoyed by her dual citizenship (''Is one country not enough for you?''), and Martina is calling to share this with Sandy, and to ask Sandy a question -- and so begins Ali Smith's 18th book, the superb novel ''Companion Piece.''
Martina was held and questioned while transporting the centuries-old Boothby Lock for the museum where she works. ''It's really beautiful,'' Martina tells Sandy. ''It's really cunning too. You could never tell by looking at it that it's even a lock, or that it has any mechanism at all inside it, never mind find how or where the key goes into it to open it.'' Which is, of course, a fine description of this novel, itself a lock, crafted by a smith, that is, by A. Smith, demanding in the engagement it requires, and rewarding of that engagement, as one picks away at the words she has used to build it.
Picking a lock of words is in fact why Martina has called Sandy, for while stuck alone in that room at border control she hears a mysterious voice. ''Curlew or curfew,'' it says, ''you choose.'' Martina is unable to stop thinking about this. What on earth can it mean? At home she lies in bed, perplexed. But she has no one she feels she can speak to. Her husband is, well, her husband, a term she uses in a way that makes Sandy suspect ''some kind of marital inadequacy quarrel.'' And as for her children: ''One would laugh. The other would call me a cis terf, which apparently I am.''
So Martina has turned to Sandy. ''You were really good at sounding like you knew what a line of poetry meant,'' Martina says. ''You just knew what things meant.'' And Sandy, surprised, and a bit suspicious, does not disappoint. ''There's a choice,'' she tells Martina, puzzling it over, immersing herself. ''A curlew is a bird, and a curfew is a time of day after which people officially aren't, by authority, permitted to be out and about.'' She goes on, feeling her way in. ''And if we think about the proffered choice, curlew or curfew, between nature and an authoritarian shaping of time, which is a human invention. ...'' Martina stops her, pleased. ''You haven't changed a bit,'' she says to Sandy. And Sandy blushes without, she tells us, knowing why.
Curlew or curfew. You choose. From these words arises the structure of the novel, which is divided into three parts. In the first, titled ''You Choose,'' Sandy is grappling with despair. Her father is ill. The whole world, it seems, is ill too. The disease is not only Covid: A sickness of hatred and injustice and oppression is spreading everywhere. ''I didn't care what season it was,'' Sandy tells us. Smith's previous four novels were a quartet named after the seasons, and we hear Smith in Sandy as she continues, ''all my life I'd loved language, it was my main character, me its eternal loyal sidekick.'' But now, ''even words and everything they could and couldn't do'' are repugnant. Sandy is an artist who is losing, in a harsh epoch, her faith in the power of art.
But the story of the lock has unlocked something in Sandy, she realizes, and her thoughts are borne back in time: to hours ago, years ago, decades ago. She recalls university, where she went out with people of both genders, which ''was seen as deeply dodgy, then, though not quite as dodgy as just being gay which is what I probably was/am,'' and where she encountered a young Martina, stumped by a poem and desperate, desperate for help, for something. As Sandy emerges from these reveries, on a walk in the forest, she realizes she's lost: numb, alone, with no idea where to go. But she feels, suddenly, that she has a choice. ''What I knew was my own absence. What I sensed, clear as unruined air, was the ghost of a chance, a different presence.''
The second part of the novel, called ''Curlew,'' takes as its recurrent theme freedom, and as its motif the V that is formed when we make our simplest drawings of a bird. The title of each of its sections (''Goodbye v hello,'' ''Story v lies'') explores the winged possibilities of a juxtaposition. And in these sections we learn that Martina has disappeared after speaking with Sandy, that Martina's children think Sandy is having an affair with their mother, that they feel Sandy has destroyed their family, that they are adrift, and that they believe she bears some responsibility for their unmooring. They arrive at her home like refugees, and Sandy, who wants them gone, does not have it in her to force them away, and so they begin to occupy, they stay. They take refuge. ''So what if something or someone happened to mess with or ruin a picture I'd been working on for over a year?'' Sandy muses, considering these refugees, in one of the breathtakingly radical passages that flash so brightly in this radical book. ''There'd always be more paint. I could start again.''
In ''You Choose,'' we are left with ''the ghost of a chance,'' and in ''Curlew,'' a ghost indeed appears, in the form of a strange girl with a curlew who turns up in Sandy's house. We learn who she may have been in the final part of the novel, ''Curfew,'' which grapples with the restrictions we place on one another. It recounts, in part, the tale of a girl who is possibly connected to the making of the Boothby Lock and is apprenticed to a smith in the distant past. The smith is an older woman who owns a forge and is superb at her work, but who dies suddenly, leaving the talented girl vulnerable to men who want the forge for themselves. A baby bird keeps her company through the horrors the world has in store for her. She is eventually arrested and marked as a vagrant: A brand of the letter V, a brand the girl herself had once made, is heated and seared into her flesh. This was a mandated punishment in those days, for the poor were not allowed to wander as they wished in Britain: Labor was kept immobile by law, registered and tethered to a place, much as poor people from the Global South are registered and kept tethered today. But the girl, now branded, wanders on. She is not forsaken by her bird.
''I'm not going to tell you what happened in the end to the girl,'' our narrator informs us, ''except that she went the way of all girls.'' And, back in the present day, Sandy, out walking her father's dog, her father better though still in the hospital, meets a girl on a bicycle who used to encounter Sandy's father on his daily dog walks. The girl asks after him and ''heads off swift as a swift.'' But then she stops and turns. She sees Sandy. And she calls out to her, a hello. A hello stunning, at the end of this remarkable novel, in its hopefulness and possibility.
Mohsin Hamid's fifth novel, ''The Last White Man,'' will be published this summer. COMPANION PIECE By Ali Smith 230 pp. Pantheon Books. $28.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: The curlew is a looming presence in Ali Smith's new novel, ''Companion Piece.'' (PHOTOGRAPH FROM PHOTO12/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Hamid, Mohsin. "Ghost of a Chance." The New York Times Book Review, 29 May 2022, p. 9(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A705261796/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=418bcd2d. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Companion Piece
Ali Smith
Hamish Hamilton, 240pp, 16.99 [pounds sterling]
When did modernism die out? There is an argument to be made that the bold experiments of a century ago, from 12-tone composition in music to the fragmentation of conventional perspective and syntax in literature, have been tried and rejected by today's art "consumers". Stanley Spencer turns out to be as influential as Picasso; the popular film music composers look back to Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, not Berg or Schoenberg.
Ali Smith, a one-woman fictional campaign as much as a novelist, has quietly refuted this idea for years. Companion Piece, which stands alongside her recent four seasonal novels, is that rare woodland creature, a work of modernism that feels thoroughly modern.
A hundred years after the publication of Ulysses, it is reasonable to feel nostalgic for the courage, freshness and radicalism of artists as different as Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Stein, Diaghilev, Matisse and Stravinsky. Most of the great modernists were pessimistic about modern culture and politics. After the First World War, they responded by trying to re-enchant daily life, to bring back the magic they felt was being lost in urban consumerism, through a return to pre-modern stories and faiths.
In literature, however, it didn't last long. There was soon a rejection of experimentation in favour of 19th-century modes of narrative. Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Georges Simenon returned to the familiar structures of Rudyard Kipling or Arthur Conan Doyle. This was partly the fault of the modernists themselves. Whether it's Ezra Pound's interpolation of ideograms and ancient Greek into his fascist poetry, or the wilder linguistic excesses of Finnegans Wake, these writers had been making life too difficult for ordinary, distracted readers.
Ali Smith, however, is a modernist for our times. Her writing isn't "difficult". She is playful, feminist, socially liberal and contemptuous of state power in ways the earlier modernists would not have understood. She is unmistakably a 21st-century voice. But Smith's way of telling a story--looping in time; switching from one fast-flicking consciousness to another; tying up radically different periods of history in a single place --and her amused delight in the flexibilities of language feel not only modernist but, better than that, modern.
Like the exiled Irish poet, she's a sucker for a good myth. Whether it is Coleridge's albatross in her recent story published in the NS, or the gleams of Shakespeare showing through in her recent novels, Smith returns to the big, old stories that have shaped our culture in order--as Pound exhorted--to make them new again.
I don't know much about Smith's life, but Companion Piece feels somehow more autobiographical than her recent fiction. In it she dispenses with the dance of characters familiar from the seasonal quartet. If this novel is a companion piece to that series, then I suppose it's because of atmosphere--it lives in the same world of magic and anarchic art half-buried in banal daily life.
The dominant voice is that of a painter (Smith's partner is an artist): an eerily gifted child, known as "Shifting Sand" at university, whose father is profoundly ill in hospital during the pandemic, and who is livid about Britain's government. Sand's need to hear and tell stories leads her into a pickle, as a mysterious and perhaps malign family sidle, one by one, into her home. Circling around this, and breaking into it, is the tale of a vagrant blacksmith girl from pre-modern times. Whether it is today's security state, or the persecution of outsiders in Jacobean villages, in Smith's world authority makes life hard for artistic young women.
The stories are pinned together with a simple if insoluble riddle: "Curlew or curfew, you choose." The essence of magic, as of black(Ali)smithery, is transformation: "A star can be an arrow. One thing can become another. They say a soul is a fixed thing and can't be changed. But all things can change or be changed, by hands and elements."
This book, then, is about change and hope in dark times. But more, it's about language. It's about the love of a father for a daughter and a daughter for a father. It's about dogs. It's about cruelty, loneliness and bravery. It's about the wonder of the wild world around us.
Enough of "about". Companion Piece is very funny. It makes you look at the world afresh. For me, it turned a cold and depressing day into a bright one.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Marr, Andrew. "A thoroughly modern modernist: Ali Smith turns the legacy of Joyce and Woolf into vital fiction for the 21st century." New Statesman, vol. 151, no. 5664, 22 Apr. 2022, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A704237623/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=27c8a80c. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
By Ali Smith
Pantheon. 240 pp. $28
- - -
When we first encounter Sandy Gray in "Companion Piece" she is in a sorry state, beyond caring, even about a bit of wordplay, though all her life she's "loved language, it was my main character, me its eternal loyal sidekick." So it's a measure of her recaptured mojo, or more likely of Ali Smith's unfailing wizardry, that by the end of this brief novel the mere word "hello" had me near tears.
Coming on the heels of Smith's seasonal quartet, which somehow kept up with the blitzkrieg of current events, "Companion Piece" takes place in our pandemic-inflected world, an all-too-familiar territory that Smith characteristically renders wonderfully strange. This she does, in part, by blending Sandy's 21st-century story with another set in the plague-haunted England of the late Middle Ages.
Actually, the story's already pretty strange by the time our medieval heroine, a girl with a bird - specifically, and significantly, a curlew - on her shoulder and a smithy's tools in hand, mysteriously appears in our present-day heroine's house. We're prepared for a modicum of magic from the start, when we find Sandy entertaining Cerberus, the mythical three-headed guard dog of the underworld. This, under the nonplussed gaze of Shep, the dog Sandy is taking care of for her father, who's in the hospital - not the virus, she is quick to say, heart stuff - though of course the virus infects everything.
What sets the plot in motion, or at least starts Sandy out of her doldrums, is a late-night call from a woman she hasn't spoken to for decades: Martina Pelf has had a peculiar experience that wants deciphering, and so she thinks of Sandy, a college acquaintance who "knew how to think about things that everybody more normal would dismiss as a bit off the planet." Martina's story involves her transporting the 16th-century Boothby Lock, "a very important historical artefact and a stunning example of workmanship in blacksmithery," for a museum and ending up in a locked room in an airport where a bodiless voice says to her, "Curlew or curfew." Then it adds: "You choose."
Unpack that. Well, Sandy tries. And for her trouble somehow ends up with the whole weird Pelf family descending on her, maskless, prompting her to flee to her father's house with Shep. The accumulating Pelfs, with their presumption of Sandy's interest, their insouciant appropriation of her house, and their acronym-peppered talk (en bee dee = no big deal, e.g.) give the book a funny farcical momentum, against which "Companion Piece's" other stories incidentally unfold.
There are glimpses of Sandy's life with her father, going back three hours, 12 hours, two years, three decades, half a century; stories of her errant mother as a child and as a woman on the verge of leaving; and the case of the girl and her curlew, who was not a vision, Sandy insists to Martina, but "a real person in my house, really stealing, really wasted, really filthy, really strong-smelling, really hurt, and with a burn on her collarbone that was really weeping." That visitation provides an outline, and Martina supplies footnotes, for the full tale told later, of an orphan taken in by a blacksmith and his wife and taught the craft but abused and cast out when her mentors die, forced into vagrancy, a crime according to the laws of her plague-ridden time. All these hundreds of years later, might the brilliant Boothby Lock be her work?
Sandy, like her author, is a word person (an artist, to her father's chagrin, who does visual representations of poems by painting one line atop another), and her narration is alive to the music and light of language, whether she's parsing an E. E. Cummings poem for Martina or explaining the etymology of a word like curfew or making sly allusions or silly puns.
And in language there's the possibility of grace. Recall Sandy's despondency starting out, reflecting on "the deaths and fragilities of any of the millions and millions and millions of individual people, with their detailed generic joyful elegiac fruitful wasted nourishing undernourished common individual lives, who were suffering or dying right now or had died over the past year and a half in what was after all just the latest plague and whose gone souls swirled invisible in shifting murmurations above every everyday day that we wandered around in, below these figurations, full of what we imagined was purpose.
"What is there to say to that loss?"
Plenty, as it turns out. Because, if in the end Sandy won't say what happened to the girl or to the bird, or "if any of this ever happened, if either of them ever existed," Smith writes, "one way or another, here they both are." And here we are, too, with Sandy, and Smith, "today on the surface of things," making our way with words.
- - -
Ellen Akins is the author of four novels and a collection of stories, "World Like a Knife."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The Washington Post
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Akins, Ellen. "Book World: Ali Smith's 'Companion Piece' is a novel for people who love language." Washington Post, 4 May 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A702450619/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3cbd2b71. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Smith, Ali COMPANION PIECE Pantheon (Fiction None) $26.95 5, 3 ISBN: 978-0-593-31637-5
An artist in England copes with old and new strangers in a time of plague in this touching entertainment.
Painter Sandy Gray is at home in England in 2021 imagining Cerberus talking to a British policeman when she gets a call from someone she barely knew at college some 30 years earlier. Martina Pelf, who remembers Sandy as being good at explaining things, tells her about getting stopped at border control on her return from a trip to collect a 16th-century lock for the museum where she works. While being held in an interview room, Martina hears a disembodied voice ask a strange sort-of question: "curlew or curfew." This is Smith's pandemic land, where myth and reality converse, where lockdown might evoke medieval artisanry, and where wordplay is more than playful. The Scottish author's 12th novel displays once again her ingenuity in pulling together disparate narrative strands. The main one concerns the fallout from the unexpected phone call, which sends Sandy, who narrates the novel, back to a moment at university when she explained an e.e. cummings poem for Martina and forward to a point when, in one long hilarious scene, the Pelf family invades Sandy's home, breaking all the pandemic rules. She recalls the story of an aunt's illness in the 1930s and often thinks of her father, who is currently in the hospital with an ailment that won't be revealed until the penultimate page. The curlew and the curfew will resurface when a homeless teenager breaks into Sandy's house and then, in a 40-page fable, is pre-incarnated as a gifted teen blacksmith, perhaps the artisan behind the aforementioned lock. With art and humor, Ali is the smith who forges links for her idiosyncratic narrative, one of which is the value of acts of kindness amid distress.
A truly marvelous tale of pandemic and puns and endurance.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Smith, Ali: COMPANION PIECE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A698656169/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c4314f21. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
GLIFF
ALI SMITH
288pp. Hamish Hamilton. 18.99 [pounds sterling].
Thirteen-year-old Briar and his younger sister Rose are hiding out in an empty house against an unspecified threat. The keys to the house are attached to a see-through plastic keyring containing a photograph of smiling children. Briar wonders if the photograph is of the house's former occupants, from a time "when there were household goods and things in it making it lived-in". No, thinks Rose. The children are either AI-generated or stock photo models, unknown to each other and snapped by "some photographer who didn't know them either and then the photographer sold it to a conlomerate". This short passage contains all but the entirety of Ali Smith's unsettling new novel in miniature: the Pinteresque, domestic-uncanny atmosphere of subdued but ineradicable menace; the displacement of the human and familial by their glassy, depthless simulacra; the poignant Martianism ("things in it making it lived-in") of children gesturing at articulacy in an atomized, increasingly non-verbal, "unlibraried" society; the formal preoccupation with language, and its deformations, both as a tool of oppression and resistance. For Rose, to mispronounce "conglomerate" is to chip, however minimally, at its power: the term has special resonance for her and Briar, whose unnamed mother, we learn forty pages later, has blown the whistle on her former employer, a large weedkiller manufacturer, and since disappeared.
We are in a totalitarian state resembling Britain in the near--possibly very near--future. Climate change has passed its tipping point; April is the cruellest month, intolerably hot and followed by cataclysmic storms. The rivers are dead, the bee and wildflower populations decimated by the pesticides the children's mother had been handsomely paid to publicize. Briar and Rose have returned to the family home to find it encircled in red paint, a sign, it will turn out, that its occupants have been deemed "unverifiable" and that the house will be bulldozed. It is Leif, their mother's boyfriend, who installs them in the safe house before leaving for a period that he foresees, incorrectly, will be no more than a fortnight: it has become too dangerous for him to stay there. And so Briar and Rose are left in their sweltering, unfurnished refuge, counting down the days in the tins of meatballs and creamed rice supplied by Leif, bickering, missing their mother, testing the limits of language, and each other's patience, via Rose's half-involuntary, half-defiant malapropisms and Briar's experimental verbosity. "I can't believe you're being so profligate already", he says when Rose suggests they treat themselves to a tin of creamed rice.
The set-up in this long first section of the novel --there are three--is tonally reminiscent of Ian McEwan's early novella The Cement Garden (1978), though without the element of incest. Like McEwan's Jack and Julie, Briar and Rose are forced into a strange, orphaned intimacy in an atmosphere of impending catastrophe. Their sole solace--other than their prickly love for one another--is an emaciated grey horse that Rose discovers in a field a short walk from the safe house. She names it Gliff, a word she has overheard, but at least affects not to understand. Later the more philologically inclined Briar learns that the word has multiple meanings, including "a shock" and "to glimmer like sudden unanticipated light", and, indeed, that it is "a substitute word for any word". "Gliff" can mean something very specific, or anything. Gliff the horse is destined for the abattoir. By rescuing him Briar and Rose adopt him as a repository of hope against the odds--a specific, immediate instance of hot-breathed reality and something less circumscribable: the freedom to make meaning in a tech-saturated dystopia intent on unmaking it.
Gliff is a peculiar novel: it insists on spelling out its own indeterminacy. The first section, entitled "horse", is frequently brilliant. Smith constructs her baleful vision of the near future from materials she finds close at hand. When, venturing from the safe house, Briar pushes over a "Supera Bounder", the machine used to paint the red lines, he is approached by Oona, an elderly woman who will turn out to belong to a resistance movement known as Campion. "Be careful after today", Oona warns Briar. "CC will have caught and stored what happened today. They'll facially trail you now." The surveillance state that has turned against Smith's protagonists is at times indistinguishable from our own. Smartphones have addicted the population to their subjugation. Children wear "educators", smartwatch-like devices that have to a great extent replaced in-person learning and "automatically record everything". Citizens are reduced to data points--"your date of birth your place of birth your ethnicity your gender your sexuality your religion your postcode your latest blood test figures"--while the fabric of the commonweal, the theatres, the libraries, the state schools, has been demolished or repurposed for private use. The novel begins in an art museum converted into an exclusive hotel.
The familiarity of Smith's mise en scene frees her to be implicit: Gliff is drenched in menace without the need to identify it. Briar and Rose move around in an environment of supreme ordinariness, of suburban streets and boarded-up demolition sites that, we are made to understand, with only the most delicate authorial intervention, have been turned against them. There is a terrific moment in the second section, "power", when Wolf, a fellow unverifiable holing up with Oona at an abandoned school, teases Daisy, another of their number, by "singing ... a song where the singer is going crazy for love and wants Daisy to give him the answers". Briar, narrating, clearly has no idea what the reference is. "He told her he knew she wanted him and said something about having a bicycle that could carry two people." This is the Martianism of terminal cultural amnesia; with the lightest of touches, Smith conjures up a society so stripped of communality that even the most basic folk knowledge has been lost.
The problem arises when the author is tempted to thumb the scale. There is an inevitably bathetic cost in revealing the precise reasons behind Briar and Rose's categorization as unverifiable. Smith is nodding to Kafka while squandering the power of Kafkaesque uncertainty: as soon as we know for sure what, in the eyes of the state, Briar and Rose's mother has done wrong, the horrors of her punishment, and that of her children, grow borders. The same could be said of the alleged crimes of Oona's fellow unverifiables. "One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn't permitted to call it a war ... Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe." Justified as it may be, this is too on the nose: it reads more like authorial indignation than a surrender to the freedom of fiction. In time the school is raided and the siblings are separated, Rose to a fate that remains in doubt until late in the book. Briar is rendered--another term whose multiple meanings are a source of fascination to him--and faces a brutal Orwellian re-education programme designed to turn him into an obedient servant of the state. Thanks to his new insider's perspective we learn, for example, of the unmonitored rendition sites in the basements of corporate buildings, and of the horrific injuries sustained by unverifiable children put to work stripping the lithium strips from batteries. Again, vividly realized as they are, these Grand Guignol-ish details pale--or, rather, are excessively coloured--by comparison with the hazy dread of the opening section. The novel's weakness for overdetermination extends, too, beyond the plot to its presiding concerns when, far from letting the untameable magnificence of Gliff the horse speak for itself, Smith gives us a mini lecture on George Stubbs and the sublime. Likewise, we feel a bit coerced when the novel's inquiry into language and its fluctuations begins to use Briar as its mouthpiece: late on he boysplains to Rose that her choice of name for their horse is "really excitingly polysemous". ("Oh", she replies. "Right.")
As the novels Ali Smith published between 2016 and 2020 formed her "Seasonal Quartet", Gliff is the first of a projected diptych. Its follow-up, Glyph (as in "hieroglyph", a "signifying mark"), is due out next year and will apparently "tell a story which is hidden in the first". As a novel of disappearances, Gliff leaves plenty of room for interpolation; the risk for its author is in her tendency to fill in the gaps.
Nat Segnit's most recent book is Retreat: The risks and rewards of stepping back from the world, 2021
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 NI Syndication Limited
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Segnit, Nat. "Give me your answer: Two siblings fend for themselves in a totalitarian state." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6346, 15 Nov. 2024, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815911712/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2d972bd4. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Gliff
by Ali Smith
Hamish Hamilton, [pounds sterling]8.99, pp. 274
'Gliff' is a word which can mean 'a short moment', 'a wallop', and 'a post-ejaculatory sex act'; to 'dispel snow', 'to frighten', and to 'escape something quickly'. It's 'really excitingly polysemous', says one of Ali Smith's characters. It's certainly an apt title for a book which can't seem to define itself.
At its centre are two children, Briar and Rose, who have been abandoned. Their mother is absent, caring for a sick sister, and their other responsible adult leaves to find her. The children exist in a stock dystopian world (people are surveilled by CCTV cameras and zombified by screens) with a twist: they repeatedly wake up to find that a red line has been painted around their house or camper van. They are on a list of 'Unverifiables'.
Smith's most recent work, the Seasonal Quartet and its Companion Piece, made a novelty of responding to real-life events, such as Brexit and Covid lockdowns, in real time. Gliff is a different sort of project, but still one which reveals a desire to comment on contemporary culture. The novel is set in the not-so-distant future--a world of AI and mass technology, in ecological crisis, but with an authoritarian regime that 're-educates' recalcitrant citizens.
There's the whisper of a good story here--about two children resisting 'progress', and about the power of language and storytelling. In the later parts of the book, swathes of narrative are rendered in dreamlike fairytale sequences. But there are many infelicities. Some of Smith's ways of signalling her dystopian future read like details in a young-adult sci-fi novel. The children find themselves among a bunch of rag-tag misfits. People wear 'educators' on their wrists and say goodbye to each other at 'docking stations'.
Other problems are more serious. The novel skips over years at pace--'I've spent the last five years of my life not letting myself think any of this'--and leaves the gaps unexplained. There's much to like about Smith's impressionistic style: she wonderfully conveys the children's perspective, and her characteristic linguistic experimentation is on full display. But the holes feel fundamental. The threat the government poses is lazily gestured at, and the possibility of resistance seems like an afterthought. The book's emotional pull--a redemption story, of sorts--is never fully realised.
It's difficult to judge Gliff on its own; a companion novel, Glyph, is due next year. But if this half is anything to go by, Smith's latest project of fictionalising the contemporary world falls flat.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Peacock, Francesca. "A brutal future." Spectator, vol. 356, no. 10236, 2 Nov. 2024, p. 44. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815088537/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2924d267. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Gliff
Ali Smith. Pantheon, $28 (272p) ISBN 978-0-593-70156-0
Smith (How to Be Both) delivers an ingenious speculative novel in which two children come to terms with the mysteries of their unnamed country, which carries a whiff of post-Brexit England. The narrator, a 16-year-old boy named Brice, accompanies his younger sister, Rose, to see off their mother after she's forced to leave for work in a far-off city. Upon returning to their house, the siblings find it encircled with a red line. As the story progresses, it becomes clear their mother is a whistleblower who has exposed the wrongdoings of a weed-killer conglomerate, and that critics of this society, deemed "unverifiables," are subject to repressive measures with frightening Orwellian echoes. Out wandering one day, Rose comes upon a field with seven "beautiful and mangy" horses including Gliff, a gray horse who becomes a symbol of natural beauty and freedom for the siblings. Smith makes the most of her protagonists' youthful perspectives to bring a sense of wonder, inquisitiveness, and pathos to the story, which sees Rose and Brice link up with a motley crew of other kids also deemed unverifiables. As in the author's Seasonal Quartet series, the lush narrative doubles as an anthem of resistance, in this case against tyranny and the destruction of the environment. Inspired references to Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf add to Smith's literary tapestry. The results are extraordinary. Agent: Tracey Bohan, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"Gliff." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 37, 30 Sept. 2024, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811729248/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13349271. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Smith, Ali GLIFF Pantheon (Fiction None) $28.00 2, 4 ISBN: 9780593701560
Two siblings find ways to get by on their own in a challenging near-future world.
Rose is about 11 and Briar 13 when their mother goes abroad to help her ailing sister. Soon after, her partner, Leif, leaves to retrieve her. The youngsters have food, money, and a place to stay, but so much is uncertain: When will Leif return? Will he find their mother? Why has someone painted a red line around their house? Adventurous Rose soon befriends a horse named Gliff, while Briar meets a rebellious old woman named Oona. The siblings' uneasy daily life changes for the better when they find the abandoned school occupied by Oona and other resourceful squatters, who provide a home for Gliff and the welcome company of adults. But always in the worrying background is a government seeking to define people by their online personal data and to quell dissent. The siblings' mother had been fired for whistleblowing at a weedkiller company and seems to have inspired her kids to distrust the state's data fixation (she herself is never named in the novel). When the story shifts briefly to five years later, Briar appears in a corporate environment and meets an assembly-line worker who knew Rose in a way that suggests the siblings got separated. Throughout the meandering plot, narrator and older sibling Briar (whose gender is withheld for most of the book) narrates much of the story's angst. But that mood is frequently lightened by the author's gift for conveying a fizzily fresh and vibrant young person's mind. Other familiar Smith subjects here include government intrusiveness, the closing of public libraries, environmental degradation, the pernicious effects of technology, and the delights of language.
A dark vision brightened by the engaging craft of an inventive writer.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Smith, Ali: GLIFF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811898623/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=954313fc. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.