In April, at a literary festival in her adopted home of Cambridge – the town she eventually settled in after growing up in Inverness, and where she began to write in earnest – Ali Smith presided over a panel of debut writers. The event is an annual fixture, in which Smith, who this week won the Baileys women’s prize for fiction for How to Be Both, selects the first novels that have most impressed her and introduces their fledgling authors to the public. Before each of the three – Sarah Bannan, Claire Lowdon and Sara Taylor – read from their books, Smith explained why she had chosen them, in a way that could hardly have given less sense of a grande dame of literature bestowing her imprimatur: warm, funny, communicative, yes – but also urgently engaged with the texts at hand. She congratulated the writers on doing something hard and daunting, and beckoned the audience in to share a world of stimulation and pleasure. Afterwards, people rushed to buy all three books. This is not a common state of affairs.
But it is a common state of Smith. She is an endless booster of other writers’ work (dead or alive), because she believes in people and in words. She believes in a literary ecology that needs care and attention to flourish and without which we will be the poorer. “In all our individual states,” she has told me, “we are always communal. There is always a point where a hand reaches out to another hand.”
The hand reaching out is there in all her work, drawing us close so we can hear whispered, mischievous stories of love, death, loss and otherness, stories that are both strikingly real and dreamily mythical. How to Be Both is a novel of companionship, its protagonists – a motherless modern teenager and a striving Renaissance artist – holding hands across the centuries; its paired stories are accessible to readers in whichever order they choose. It’s a book founded on the generosity and openness of its creator, and it simply wouldn’t have worked any other way.
