Ali Smith

Ali Smith is a writer, born in 1962 in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. Openly gay, she has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 20 years.

Short story collections

 * The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003)
 * Other Stories and Other Stories (1999)
 * Free Love and Other Stories (1995), awarded the Saltire First Book of the Year award.

Novels

 * Girl Meets Boy (2007), winner of Diva Magazine readers’ choice Book of the Year
 * The Accidental (2007), shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and won the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year award.
 * Hotel World (2001), awarded the Encore Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the inaugural Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Recently adapted to the stage by Kidbrooke secondary school and performed at Greenwich Theatre and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2007.
 * Like (1997).

Other projects
Ali Smith partnered with the Scottish band Trashcan Sinatras and wrote the lyrics to a song called "Half An Apple", a simple, bittersweet love song about keeping half an apple spare for a loved one who is gone.

"Half An Apple" was released on March 5th, 2007, in the album Ballads of the Book, a collaboration between some of Scotland’s top contemporary writers and poets, and established and upcoming Scottish musicians. It's a project originally set up by Roddy Woomble of Idlewild, while corresponding with poet Edwin Morgan. Woomble got independent record label Chemikal Underground onboard, and received enthusiastic support of the Scottish Arts Council.