Smith is also unusual among British writers in being committed to the short story, a form whose health in this country tends to give rise to either gloom or embattled boosterism.
If an occasion calls for flat or wilted writing, that's fine by her. And while she's interested in style, in finding voices for her characters and using language in unexpected or counter-conventional ways, she's not interested in stylishness as John Updike, for example, would understand it. She alludes freely to other writers but has never seemed dominated by any particular influence although politics is everywhere in her work, it's elusive too. But most aspects of her output, from the everyday diction to the ragged right-hand margins she's gone in for since Hotel World (2001), give off an air of reader-friendly homemadeness rather than lab-coated authority. Smith has served time in the academic world, and the more self-conscious side to her writing sometimes attracts the label "experimental".
A mong the British writers who've made names for themselves in the last 15 years or so, Ali Smith stands out as one of the most original, or at least the hardest to categorise.
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