Novelist Ali Smith named Honorary Fellow

Acclaimed novelist and winner of the Goldsmiths Prize (2014), Ali Smith CBE, will this week be awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Goldsmiths, University of London.

Ali Smith has been a friend and supporter of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths for several years, lecturing and teaching masterclasses on our MA Creative and Life Writing. A popular guest speaker, she has also given public readings from her books at a number of Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre events. 

Born in Inverness in 1962, Smith studied at the University of Aberdeen, then Newnham College, Cambridge, and taught at the University of Strathclyde before becoming a full time writer. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007 and in 2015 was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s New Year Honours for her services to literature. 

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize in 2001 for Hotel World, and in 2005 for The Accidental, Smith went on to win the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year (The Accidental), and Diva magazine’s readers’ choice in 2007 for Girl Meets Boy.    

There But For The (2011) was cited by the Guardian as one of the best books of 2011. Artful reached the shortlist of the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013. How To Be Both (2014) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Folio Prize, the Costa Book Awards Novel Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. 

Dr Tim Parnell, Senior Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths and Goldsmiths Prize Literary Director comments: “Ali Smith is one of the very finest British writers of her generation and her work as a novelist is of the kind that the Goldsmiths Prize was created to reward. 

“The nature of her work - consistently innovative, daring and inventive - and its intelligent and generous humanity make her a perfect Honorary Fellow for our university. She is a professed supporter of what Goldsmiths does and stands for, and I can think of no more worthy recipient of a Fellowship.”