大象传媒

Award-winning novelist, playwright and short story writer Ali Smith is the author of 12 novels, three of which have been nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Her best-selling How To Be Both won the Women鈥檚 Prize for Fiction and the Costa Novel of the Year in 2014. Brought up in the Scottish Highlands, she was the youngest of five children in a working class family, studied English at Aberdeen University and began writing fiction whilst studying for a doctorate at Cambridge.

Ali Smith tells John Wilson about the influence of cinema on her fiction, particularly the work of French new wave director Jacques Rivette whose disregard for conventional linear narrative in films including C茅line and Julie Go Boating made a big impression. She also recalls how, as an aspiring writer, the work of fellow Scottish novelists and poets, including Liz Lochhead, Alistair Gray, James Kelman and Muriel Spark, helped give her the confidence to write her own fiction. Ali Smith also discusses 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty, a contemporary of Peter Blake and David Hockney, who tragically died at the age of 28 in 1966. Boty鈥檚 life and work - overlooked for three decades after she died - became a central aspect of Ali Smith鈥檚 2016 novel Autumn, the first of a quartet of seasonal-themed books written and published over four years.

Producer: Edwina Pitman