Ali Smith CBE FRSL (born 24 August 1962) is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist.

[5][8] Smith moved to Edinburgh from Cambridge in 1990 and worked as a lecturer in Scottish, English and American literature at the University of Strathclyde.

[5][8] As a young woman, Smith held several part-time jobs including a waitress, lettuce-cleaner, tourist board assistant, receptionist at BBC Highland and advertising copywriter.

After some time working in Scotland, she returned to Cambridge to concentrate on her writing, in particular, focussing on short stories and freelancing as the fiction reviewer for The Scotsman newspaper.

[17] In 2024 she was awarded the Bodley Medal for contributions to literature, the highest honour of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.