Artful

Ali Smith, speaking at the Goldsmiths Prize 2013 Shortlist Readings event:

"I'm really pleased to be on this shortlist, I think it's a fantastic list. I've never been at such a sexy reading. It's fantastic to be sitting present to work which is so alive, so properly sensual, it's actually about the senses, about texture. I don't think I've ever participated in anything quite like this. It's why I'm very excited about this being a prize and why it will make a huge difference."

Adapted from four lectures given by Ali Smith at Oxford University (the Weidenfeld series), Artful is a tidal wave of ideas in four thematically organised bursts of thought: 'On Time', 'On Form', 'On Edge' and 'On Offer and On Reflection'.

Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. Full of both the poignancy and humour of fiction and all the sideways insights and jaunty angles you would expect from Ali Smith's criticism, it explores form, style, life, love, death, mortality, immortality and what art and writing can mean.

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of There but for the, Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories.

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