Friday, June 5, 2015

My hero / Ali Smith by Alex Clark




Ali Smith in her garden at home in Cambridge. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer


My hero: Ali Smith by Alex Clark



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 


Alex Clark
Fri 5 Jun 2015

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.

 But it is a common state of Smith. She is an endless booster of other writers’ work (dead or alive), because she believes in people and in words. She believes in a literary ecology that needs care and attention to flourish and without which we will be the poorer. “In all our individual states,” she has told me, “we are always communal. There is always a point where a hand reaches out to another hand.”

 The hand reaching out is there in all her work, drawing us close so we can hear whispered, mischievous stories of love, death, loss and otherness, stories that are both strikingly real and dreamily mythical. How to Be Both is a novel of companionship, its protagonists – a motherless modern teenager and a striving Renaissance artist – holding hands across the centuries; its paired stories are accessible to readers in whichever order they choose. It’s a book founded on the generosity and openness of its creator, and it simply wouldn’t have worked any other way.
THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)