Ali Smith
Ali Smith is the novelist working today who has paid the closest attention to the contours of the present time, as they shift before us. From her novels The Accidental, There But For The, and How To Be Both, to her Seasonal Quartet (Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer), to her most recent pair of novels, Gliff and Glyph, Smith has fashioned a fictional language with which to address the deep transformations in contemporary life that the current century has brought about.
In doing so, Smith’s fiction is alive to the forces that threaten the very possibility of life in a democratically shared world today. But her novels, in bearing witness to such threats, are animated by the spirit of a certain kind of hope, the possibility of a different future that is intrinsic to the literary imagination itself.
