Ali Smith

Ali Smith doesn’t like giving interviews. In fact Ali Smith doesn’t give interviews. So when I open an email saying she’s agreed to meet up ahead of her appearance at Cambridge Wordfest, I do a double-take, followed by a slightly ridiculous dance of joy.

Given her success, you’d think Smith would be keen to chat – boast, even - about her work. Her deliciously quirky postmodern novels have been universally acclaimed, and rewarded too: Hotel World won the 2002 Encore award, The Accidental won the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year award, and both were shortlisted for the coveted Man Booker and Orange Prizes.

Yet beyond the fact that Ali Smith Scottish, openly gay and a Cambridge resident, I know very little about the writer herself.

Then the doubts kick in. Interviewing someone who hates being interviewed is never much fun – and never makes for a great feature. Will she be prickly? Frosty? Reticent? All three?

It turns out that Smith is none of the above. In fact she’s surprisingly smiley: “It’s nothing personal,” she says with a laugh, when I ask her why she doesn’t like talking to the press. “I’m sure you’re very nice.” So why, then?

“Who do you like who's dead? Do you like Jane Austen? Do you like Shakespeare?” Of course, I reply. “What do you know about them?” Ah. Not a lot. “It's better because we know less. The more we know, the more it gets in the way of the book.

“If a personality comes between you and the thing that you're reading, the personality will probably win out. And that's the least interesting thing about what we're doing if we're writing.”

But doesn’t she want fame? Smith hoots with laughter. “No! I actually really don't. I really don't. I'm really not interested.”

So why write? “Because I can. We all do the thing that we can: if you can make a car work, if you can kick a ball, if you can cook a fantastic meal, if you can make things grow, if you can write a story, that's what you do. We find the thing that we're able to do, and we do it.”

For Smith, the realisation that writing was the ‘thing she could do’ came at an early age. Born in Inverness in 1962, she was 8 when she discovered her natural facility for rhyme: “I found this out because we were given something to do at school; I could do it and I enjoyed it. So I wrote a set of little poems and gave them to my sister. That's when it started.”

After school, Smith went to University in Aberdeen and, at 22, was all set to do a PhD at Edinburgh: “then a place came up here. It was all very last-minute; I had a letter from an academic lady called Heather Glen, and I thought it was a joke. Heather Glen? I thought my friends were having me on. But she's real. She's nice!”

Smith duly packed her bags and, alongside her dad, drove down from Scotland to Newnham College in a van. Seeing the city for the first time was a delightful shock: “I couldn't believe it. I actually literally couldn't believe it. I hadn't even seen pictures of Cambridge so I knew nothing about it.

“I was driving down The Backs, and I swear I nearly crashed the van. I saw the cows on the common land at the back of King's, and I was like 'Look at that!’” she squeaks. “My dad had to hold the wheel.”

After leaving chilly Scotland, the balmy southern weather came as an equally lovely shock. “It was the middle of October and people were out in their shorts, and this was an extraordinary thing! I thought I'd come to a brand new planet.”

Smith spent the next five years completing her PhD in Cambridge. It was here she met Sarah Wood, an undergraduate at Robinson College, and when she was offered a teaching post at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, they went up together - they’re still a couple today.

But the job didn’t work out; Smith found she hated teaching, to the point where standing in front of a roomful of students made her feel physically sick. “I did it for a couple of years, but I knew it wasn't for me.

“I got quite ill; I had a bout of chronic fatigue syndrome. It was like I'd hit a wall, so I waited quietly to see what would happen next. I had it very lightly – people have it much more harshly than I had it - but the 'lightly' I had it was horrible. I was pretty out of it for a year and a half.”

At the time, Sarah was working at Waterstone’s in Edinburgh: “and when Waterstone's was first setting up in Cambridge, she came home one lunchtime and said 'They've just offered me this job, do you want to go?' We'd only just bought a flat in Edinburgh, so we thought well, will we? And we just did.

“For me it was fantastically practically useful, because Cambridge is flat. If you have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome it's quite hard to walk, but cycling is easier because it uses one third of the amount of energy that walking does. All of a sudden I was mobile again and it was just blessed relief.”

It was here that Smith first began to write in earnest, starting with short stories “because they were short! My arms hurt.” But not earning meant she had to live cheaply. “For a long time I had no money at all, but we knew a very nice man who let us live in his house practically rent-free. If I ever win the lottery I will give it all to him. People's kindness at certain times in our lives makes things possible.”

Her first book, Free Love and Other Stories, was published in 1995, winning the Saltire First Book of the Year award. She’s since written three further short story collections, and five novels, most of which took four years to write.

Incredibly, Smith insists that she doesn’t know what’s going to happen in her stories until it happens - even with her latest novel, There But For The, in which characters are linked in the strangest of ways.

“You have to wait and see, like you do in life. Novels are really interesting that way, actually, because they are huge structures. If you imagine the roof of St Pancras, which is a really solid structure, you have a beginning and you have an end - those are the two legs of the arch - but underneath that structure, anything and everything can happen.

“If you write something, you look at it, and maybe the word 'green' will turn up in four places in one paragraph, so then you think ‘What does green mean?’ It means immaturity, it means spring, it means newness, it means naivety. Then you look in those directions to see what the words want you to do.”

So do her books have a life of their own? “Yes, that’s how I see it. A story will, like a wild horse, take its head and just go the way it wants to go. And if you aren't listening to that, then your story will end up tied down.

“It's very practical, it's not at all mysterious, but it is instinctual. It's about allowing yourself to get lost so that you will end up knowing what home is again.”

With glowing reviews from the critics, There But For The looks likely to scoop even more awards for Smith’s virtual trophy cabinet, but she insists that’s of no interest to her. “It doesn't register that way,” she shrugs. “You just hope you'll be able to do the next book and it'll be all right.”

Do the prizes mean there’s more pressure on her? “There would be if those things mattered to me, but they really, really don't. Those things only matter in the world where people make money out of your book.

“But if I make enough to be able to do the thing I'm doing, great. And if I don't, then I'll find some other way to do it. The only thing that matters to me is to get the story right.”

November 2011 (c) Cambridge News