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Introduction » |
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Ali Smith's last novel, Hotel World, was shortlisted for the 2001 Orange and Booker prizes, and much is expected of her brand-new offering. Smith's profile was further raised recently when, in a preface to Picador's New Writing 13 anthology, she and fellow novelist Toby Litt described most of the submissions from women as 'disappointingly domestic ... as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell'. Smith herself clearly cannot be characterised in this way. The Accidental is still under wraps as we go online, but here's a flavour: 'I was born in the year of the supersonic, the era of the multi-storey multivitamin multitonic, the highrise time of men with the technology and women who could be bionic, when jump jets were Harrier, when QE2 was Cunard, when thirty-eight feet tall the Princess Margaret stood stately in her hoverpad ... ' |
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 Ali Smith |
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