How to be Both: Ali Smith in conversation with Alex Clark
Tuesday 2 September 2014, 6 p.m. · 58 minutes![](https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/storage/300_filter/images/2/7/1/0/530172-10-eng-GB/5267cc9c425fb.jpg 300w, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/storage/400_filter/images/2/7/1/0/530172-10-eng-GB/5267cc9c425fb.jpg 400w, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/storage/800_filter/images/2/7/1/0/530172-10-eng-GB/5267cc9c425fb.jpg 800w, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/storage/1200_filter/images/2/7/1/0/530172-10-eng-GB/5267cc9c425fb.jpg 1200w)
The novel is a fantastic convention: it does all the things that we need the novel to do. But it can also do the things that we don't expect a novel to do, while allowing us the satisfactions of narrative. It can go past convention; it can access the under-novel.
Ali Smith has been described by Kate Atkinson as ‘one of the few contemporary writers ploughing a genuinely modernist furrow.’ Her latest novel how to be both continues her almost reckless experimentation with form and content, adapting the artistic techniques of fresco painting to literature in telling a dual-time tale of art, love, injustice and redemption.
Ali came to the Bookshop to give a reading from her novel, and went on to discuss art, writing and subversion with Alex Clark of the Guardian.