It’s fitting that such a generous and open novelist, and such a champion of other writers, should win this year’s Baileys women’s prize for fiction
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.
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