Literary Birthday – 24 August – Ali Smith

Happy Birthday, Ali Smith, born on 24 August 1962.

Ali Smith Quotes

1. Great books are adaptable. They alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives.
2. Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst, and living to your full. They mean everything.
3. Short stories consume you faster. They’re connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they’re also a total joy.
4. A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I’d much rather go and read a book.
5. Words are like untying a corset – you can move into this great space with them.
6. All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language – on all its levels.
7. Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship.
8. To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.
9. There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in everything, everywhere we look.
10. And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.

Ali Smith is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright, academic, and journalist. She is well known for her three major collections of short stories Free Love and Other Stories, Other Stories and Other Stories, and The First Person. Her award-winning novels include the Seasonal Quartet:  Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer. Smith was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and won the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year award for The Accidental. She uses slipstream fiction techniques in some of her writing, particularly the Costa-award-winning The Accidental. Her latest novels are Gliff and Glyph. In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature. In 2024, she was awarded the Bodley Medal for contributions to literature, the highest honour of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Source for Image: Lucy Cavendish College

by Amanda Patterson
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