“But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll probably find out – and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out – what happened. And if we don't, we feel cheated.”

Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist

Ali Smith is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. She is known for fiction and for work that moves across genres, with writing that often engages with social and political questions. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as “Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting.” Her novels Gliff and Glyph, released in successive years, are linked by their shared sound and by their focus on contemporary dilemmas and political concerns.