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.
In this conversation, Ali Smith and Peter Boxall will discuss how such pictures of the future come about, and what the role of the literary imagination is in making a different future possible.
About Utopia Now! Conference
This international conference sets out to explore the possibility of utopian imagining today, at a time when many of our social, political and environmental conditions are in crisis.
The conference brings together writers and thinkers from across disciplines, to produce a mobile critical picture of the condition of utopian thought now. The keynotes (Ali Smith, Kiran Desai, Homi Bhabha) bring literary fiction into dialogue with philosophy and critical theory. The panels bring together thinkers from the environmental humanities, the medical humanities, linguistics, film studies, literary studies and political theory, among other disciplinary formations.
In exploring the possibility of utopian thought today, the conference will offer a fresh reflection on the ways in which our aesthetic, critical and discursive forms are able to summon pictures of a better world.
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