Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of many novels, including most recently Autumn, Winter and Spring in the 'Seasonal' quartet. Her 2014 novel How to be both won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. She has also been shortlisted once for the Orwell Prize, twice for the Orange Prize and four times for the Man Booker Prize, among many other prizes. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.
Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious, exhilaratingly sharp-eyed . . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh * Sunday Telegraph * Joyous, a shot across the bows . . . writing as rapture, as giddy delight * The Times * An astonishing book - funny and moving, playful and shocking. It is what one hopes for in a modern novel, and yet it confounds all expectations. It is complex. It is beautiful. It is exhilarating. It is fiction at its most artful * Financial Times * A beguiling page-turner ... a brilliant creation. To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last * Independent * Smith's novels fizz with pyrotechnic prose, whirl-wind openings, bewitching invention * Observer * Exuberantly inventive ... at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark * Sunday Times *