The Literary Art of Ali Smith

Born and bred in Scotland, Ali Smith grew up in Inverness, graduating with a degree in English language and literature from the University of Aberdeen, and went on to pursue a doctoral degree in modernism at the University of Cambridge, before abandoning her studies in favour of creative writing. At this stage in her life, her literary output mostly comprised unpublished plays performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Following a brief period as a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde between 1990 and 1992, she settled permanently in Cambridge and embarked on a career as a freelance writer and fiction reviewer, notably for the Scotsman. In her first mature efforts, she turned her attention to polishing the art of the short story, resulting in the publication of her debut collection, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), which earned her immediate critical acclaim and won both the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her first novel, Like, appeared in 1997, and a steady flow of further short story collections and novels followed. She is the winner of numerous prestigious literary awards, including the Encore Award for Hotel World (2001), the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award for The Accidental (2005) and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for How to Be Both (2014). All three books, as well as the novel Autumn (2016) from her seasonal quartet, have also been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

It is a critical commonplace to approach authors who happen to fall into the neat category of a so-called minority from the specific perspective of that minority. While this approach is not without merit, it would be a gross simplification to limit the extraordinary richness of Ali Smith’s oeuvre to the preset labels of nationality, gender and sexual preference. Smith’s Scottishness, femaleness and lesbianism indeed inform her work, but so do many other influences, if perhaps to a less conspicuous degree. The author’s formal education in literature, and particularly her interest in modernism, are unmistakably apparent in her texts, which weave together a rich tapestry of allusions to sources as diverse as classic mythology, the condition-of-England novel and modernist poetry. These references are as often as not playfully reimagined rather than presented at face value, and juxtaposed with Smith’s original material, resulting in a quirky mixture of an inherited tradition and strikingly (post)modern techniques, topics and sensibilities.

Smith is fascinated with the voice, and with silence as a lack of voice, and is preoccupied with telling and retelling the stories of those whom she feels do not get their fair share of space when it comes to being heard and seen. Her interests are not sweeping grand narratives and larger-than-life figures; quite the contrary, she favours almost painfully ordinary characters with dull everyday lives and down-to-earth concerns. At the same time, she draws on the Scottish literary tradition, which is rooted in the concept of Caledonian antisyzygy, turning on the idea of reconciling seemingly conflicting opposites and involving the gothic tropes of doppelgangers, ghosts and haunting. More broadly, Smith’s indebtedness to Caledonian antisyzygy finds its expression in her characteristic combination of chillingly cruel stories and startlingly black humour, occasionally bordering on the grotesque and the farcical. Nevertheless, underlying all of her work is a deeply human ethos, which emerges in her trademark carefully poised endings on a note of tentative reconciliation and qualified hope for the future. Ultimately, for all her challenging formal experiments and focus on dark subject matters, Smith is committed to telling a universal story which underlines the fact that, when stripped of all particulars, human experience is universally shared after all.