Ali Smith

Smith grew up in Inverness, one of five children in a council-house family, and studied at Aberdeen University before a Cambridge PhD she abandoned, ill, without finishing: an experience of illness and interrupted ambition that recurs throughout her fiction.

Autumn (2016), the first installment of her Seasonal Quartet and the first English-language novel to answer the Brexit referendum directly, pairs young Elisabeth with her dying elderly neighbor Daniel, their decades-long friendship threaded through the rediscovered art of the real 1960s Pop artist Pauline Boty.

She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice, for How to Be Both and Autumn, and continues to write and publish with a speed and topicality almost no other literary novelist attempts, dividing her time between Cambridge and the Highlands.