Ali Smith
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2016
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ali Smith is a Scottish writer. Born in Inverness in 1962, the youngest of five children by seven years, she says, "I grew up completely alone but with all the comforts of knowing I had a cushioning family structure around me - and yet I could free myself from it."
After reading English at Aberdeen and nearly completing a PhD at Cambridge, she started down an academic path, winning a lectureship at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, but she soon decided that academia wasn't for her.
She gave herself three years in which to make it as a writer. By then she had moved from writing poems, for which she had discovered an aptitude aged eight, to short stories.
Her first collection, Free Love and Other Stories, was published in 1995.
Since then she has written novels, including How to Be Both, and The Accidental, as well as plays. Nominated three times for the Booker Prize, her fiction has won numerous literary awards including the Goldsmiths Award, the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
Producer: Sarah Taylor.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:02.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. |
| 0:05.0 | Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:10.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:14.4 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:20.0 | UK slash Radio 4. Mye cast away this week is the writer Ali Smith. Her novels and short stories have won lots of prizes and endless admirers. |
| 0:46.0 | But for an author of her stature, she remains intriguingly shy of the publishing publicity machine. |
| 0:52.2 | Believing that the more readers know about a writer, |
| 0:54.3 | the more it gets in the way of their stories. Born to an English father and an Irish mother, she was |
| 1:00.0 | brought up in the Highlands of Scotland on the banks of the Caledonian Canal, |
| 1:04.0 | reading from the age of three and writing her first poetry at eight. |
| 1:07.6 | If this all sounds achingly Arcadian, it wasn't. Her mum had been a bus conductor. Her dad was an electrician and little |
| 1:14.7 | Ali was the youngest by far of five kids, something of a surprise baby. She says of |
| 1:20.8 | her work stories can change lives if we're not careful. |
| 1:24.5 | They will come in and take the shirts off our backs, |
| 1:27.4 | tell the right stories, and we live better lives. |
| 1:30.2 | So welcome, Ali. |
| 1:31.9 | It's a very interesting thing to say this idea of telling the right stories. Tell me more about what you mean by that. |
| 1:37.0 | Stories are incredibly powerful. In fact, we think we live and we're just living and it's just we're just living along going from day to day. |
| 1:42.0 | Actually, we live by telling |
| 1:43.4 | ourselves stories about the lives we are living and we take in like sponges the stories that come at us |
| 1:48.6 | on all the waves and all the radio waves and the TV we and the internet all the ways everything is a kind of story which all adds to the story of which is supposed to be the story of each individual's life. So it's not surprising if the stories are good and they come into us and we're the sponges that take the stories in then we'll feel better about it and if those stories are coming into us and us being so porous |
... |
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