Ali Smith is a Scottish author, playwright, and journalist. As a fiction author, she is best known as the author of The Accidental which won the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year, Girl Meets Boys which was the Diva magazine readers’ choice Book of the Year, and How to Be Both which was the winner of the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize and of the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards.
Smith was born in Inverness where she grew up. She then went on to earn a joint degree in English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen. She would later study a PhD in American and Irish modernism at Newnham College, Cambridge. While studying for her Ph, she began writing plays which eventually lead to her focusing on writing.
Publication Order of Seasonal Books
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Publication Order of Park Stories Books
Publication Order of Anthologies
If You Like Ali Smith Books, You’ll Love…
Autumn is the first book in the Seasonal Quarter, four separate yet interconnected books. The story here revolves around a friendship between an old man and his young female neighbor and their friendship. Elisabeth is the main narrator for most of the story while Daniel is nearly one-hundred years old and nearing the end. Their story is told in the present and the past, tying in life, love, and Brexit in a wholly unique way.
One of Smith’s most popular works is How to Be Both. This is a novel about art’s versatility as Smith borrows from paintings fresco technique to write another unique piece. Like many Smith books, this one is hard to summarize. It follows a Renaissance artist in the 1940s and a child of a child of the 1960s. The two tales meld into a singular story as Smith masterfully plays with time and structure. For Kindle users you can read this book in two different ways, “camera” or “eyes”. The text is the same, but you read it in a different order.
