Another featured author at the EdBookFest in 2011. Unfortunately, Ali Smith read at the festival while I was checking in at Schiphol. So, I missed her voice. After having read her short story collection "The Whole Story and other stories", I am even more aware of what I've missed. Her very original voice, her wittiness of breaking with literary conventions, jumping from one first-person narrator to another and leaving it undefined whether it is a female or male narrator. She is constantly triggering the reader to sort out the storyline and get the right point of view, not taking one along a well-trodden path. Additionally, she plays with conventions and breaks with everyday concepts. Like, say, falling in love with a tree as in the short story "may"?
"I tell you. I fell in love with a tree. I couldn't not. It was in blossom."
Reason enough, sure, but, hey, a tree? And be assured, it is not a bird or squirrel talking....So another witty Scottish author, Ali Smith was born in Inverness, Scotland, UK. According to wikipedia, Smith was born to "working-class parents" and "raised in a council house" (mind you!). She studied at the University of Aberdeen and went to Newnham College at Cambridge to never finish her PhD. While working as a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde she fell ill with the myalgic encephalomyelitis syndrom, or more commonly named, the chronic fatigue syndrom. She now lives with her partner Sarah Wood in Cambridge and is a full-time writer besides of writing for various newspapers as The Guardian, The Scotsman and the Times Literary Supplement. Her brilliant talent lies in exploring the everyday for unexpected beauty and at the same time picturing the comedy in it while capturing bizarre psychological territories. Her canny style won her already various prizes, several of her short stories were shortlisted and the critics are full of praise. Certainly a modern writer you shouldn't miss.