Ali Smith abandoned a Cambridge doctorate because she kept writing plays
Sebastian Barry called Ali Smith Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting. Her route there ran through an Inverness council house, jobs cleaning lettuce and writing adverts, and a PhD on modernism she never finished because playwriting took over. Her latest pair of novels share a sound but not a spelling: Gliff and Glyph.
Her parents, Ann and Donald, were working-class Highlanders, and after her arrival on 24 August 1962 the family lived in an Inverness council house. After Inverness High School she read English at the University of Aberdeen from 1980, topping her class and winning its Bobby Aitken poetry prize in 1984. Along the way she earned money as a waitress, tourist board assistant, BBC Highland receptionist and advertising copywriter.
In 1985 she went to Newnham College, Cambridge, to research American and Irish modernism. Instead she found herself writing plays, staged at the Edinburgh Fringe and by Cambridge Footlights, and the doctorate went unfinished. A lectureship at the University of Strathclyde followed in 1990, but chronic fatigue syndrome forced her to leave in 1992, and she returned to Cambridge to recover and write, reviewing fiction for The Scotsman. Her debut collection, Free Love and Other Stories, appeared in 1995 and won the Saltire First Book of the Year award.
Her output ranges well beyond novels. She wrote lyrics for the Trashcan Sinatras song Half An Apple, about keeping half an apple for someone who has gone. She retold Sophocles' Antigone for children, gave Oxford lectures on comparative literature that became the book Artful in 2013, and has given stories to charity anthologies for Oxfam, Save the Children and the Woodland Trust. As a patron of Refugee Tales she contributed The Detainee's Tale in 2016.
Honours have accumulated: fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007, a CBE in 2015 for services to literature, and in 2024 the Bodley Medal, the Bodleian Library's highest award. Gliff, published in 2024, and its homophone partner Glyph in 2026 take on present-day social and political dilemmas, and in May 2026 Gliff won the International Dublin Literary Award. She lives in Cambridge with her partner, the filmmaker Sarah Wood.
Source: Ali Smith
