Ali Smith (born 1962 in Inverness) is a Scottish writer.She was born to working-class parents,raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge.She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that she never finished.She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with CFS/ME. Following this she became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement.she lives in Cambridge with her partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.She won the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards.