Ali Smith is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist.
Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. Her parents were working-class and she was raised in a council house in Inverness. From 1967 to 1974 she attended St. Joseph's RC Primary school, then went on to Inverness High School, leaving in 1980.
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.
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.
Smith moved to Edinburgh from Cambridge in 1990 and worked as a lecturer of Scottish, English and American literature at the University of Strathclyde.
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.
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. 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.
She writes articles for The Guardian, The Scotsman, New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement. [1]
How to Be Both is a 2014 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith. The story is told from two perspectives: those of George, a pedantic 16-year-old girl living in contemporary Cambridge, and Francesco del Cossa, an Italian renaissance artist responsible for painting a series of frescoes in the 'Hall of the Months' at the Palazzo Schifanoia (translated as the 'Palace of Not Being Bored' in the novel) in Ferrara, Italy.
Two versions of the book were published simultaneously, one in which George's story appears first, the other in which Francesco's comes first.
It was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and the 2015 Folio Prize. It won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards and the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. [1]
The UK first edition cover of How to Be Both features a photograph of 1960s French pop stars Sylvie Vartan (the “twisting schoolgirl” whom George apparently resembles) and Françoise Hardy (a stand-in for George’s friend H).
When Franchesco, from her post in purgatory, sees a photo of the young women hanging on George’s wall, she describes it with a keen painter’s eye in a passage capturing the growing friendship and first blushes of love:
"a picture of 2 beautiful girls seen walking along like friends do: one has gold hair, one has dark but the dark of her hair is sunlit to lightness—both the heads of the girls are: they are walking along a street with awnings: it’s a warm place: their clothes are mosaic gold and azzurrite: the girls are in conversational commerce and look as if between sentences: the goldener one is preoccupied: the darker headed girl turns her head toward her in a most natural gesture in open air and so she can see the other better: her looking has about it politeness, humility, respect, a kind of gentle intent." [2]