We are beyond excited to host this event with one of our absolute favourite authors, Ali Smith with her latest novel Glyph publishing in January 2026. Ali will be in conversation with author, Anna Metcalfe.

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women’s Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

Glyph

Ghosts don’t exist.
They don’t. End of.
Story, however.
It is haunting.
Everything tells it.

It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost.
Is it imaginary? Is it real?

Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom.
What to do? She phones her sister.

In a chiaroscuro dance through our increasingly antagonistic era, Glyph asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making. A funny, warm and clear-eyed take on where we are now, Glyph is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness.

This anti-war novel, Ali Smith’s most soulful, playful and vital yet, is a work of lightness that goes deep to counter the forces currently flattening the modern world.

A standalone novel, it’s family to Gliff (2024).

‘Ali Smith is one of our greatest living novelists, the Virginia Woolf or our times’   The Observer

‘Few writers today can make a more compelling claim to singularity of innovation and sustained brilliance’   Times Literary Supplement

‘One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today’    The Scotsman

Anna Metcalfe is a writer and lecturer in Creative Writing. Her short stories have been published in Lighthouse, The Dublin Review and Granta, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the Bridport Prize and collected in her first book Blind Water Pass. Her debut novel, Chrysalis, was published in 2023, the same year she was named as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. She teaches writing at the University of Birmingham.