The SoAH 'Re-Enactment' Research Group Presents Ali Smith

The School of Arts & Humanities presents the acclaimed writer, Ali Smith, for readings and in conversation with SoAH research students.

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, she was a lecturer at the University of Stratchclyde. Her first collection of short fiction, Free Love and Other Stories, won the Saltire First Book Award in 1995 and she has written four further collections, most recently Public Library and Other Stories. 

Her first novel, Like, was published in 1997. Her second, Hotel World, won the Encore Award, the East England Arts Award of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize. Her third, The Accidental (2005), won the Whitbread Novel Award and was also shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and Booker Prize. There But For The was published in 2011, followed in 2014 by How to Be Both, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Folio Prize and also won the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year award. In 2007, she published her contribution to Canongate's Myths series, Girl Meets Boy, a retelling of the transformation of Iphis from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Autumn, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, is the first in a planned quartet and is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. 

Participating 

Juliette Blightman is an artist, with recent exhibitions at Maureen Paley, London (hosted by Felix Gaudlitz) and O-Town House, Los Angeles. Her PhD at the RCA researches the relevance of feminist literature of the last one hundred years to creative practice, technology and motherhood. 

Sharon Boothroyd is an artist and lecturer. She exhibits internationally in venues including Venice Exchange, Tate Liverpool, Encontros das Imagem, Braga and Centre for Photography, Clement Ferrond. Her PhD research at the RCA looks at hysterical narrative as agency. 

Marita Fraser is an artist and writer whose recent exhibitions include Moore Contemporary, Perth and Gallery Layendecker, Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Fraser's PhD by practice examines how performative feminist texts operate as score in contemporary art practice and writing. 

Kate Paul is an MRes student at the RCA, and is currently undertaking practice-based research on experimental teaching tools. Before coming to the RCA, she worked in primary schools and completed a degree in Comparative Literature. 

Chair 

Professor Rebecca Fortnum, Lead Research Programme, School of Art and Humanities and Professor of Fine Art