Ali Smith is a writer born in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen and then at Cambridge for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with the writing magazine Mslexia, she briefly discussed the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to leave her job as a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. She has been with her partner, Sarah Wood, for 17 years and dedicates all her books to her. (From Goodreads)