Ali Smith CBE FRSL (born 24 August 1962) is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting."

Smith was born in Inverness on 24 August 1962 to Ann and Donald Smith. Her parents were working-class and she was raised in a council house in Inverness. From 1967 to 1974 she attended St. Joseph's RC Primary school, then went on to Inverness High School, leaving in 1980.

She pursued a joint degree in English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen from 1980 to 1985, coming first in her class in 1982 and gaining a top first in Senior Honours English in 1984. She won the university's Bobby Aitken Memorial Prize for Poetry in 1984.

From 1985 to 1990 she attended Newnham College, Cambridge, studying for a PhD in American and Irish modernism. During her time at Cambridge, she began writing plays and as a result, did not complete her doctorate.

Smith moved to Edinburgh from Cambridge in 1990 and worked as a lecturer in Scottish, English and American literature at the University of Strathclyde. She left the university in 1992 because she was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. She returned to Cambridge to recuperate.

As a young woman, Smith held several part-time jobs including waitress, lettuce-cleaner, tourist board assistant, receptionist at BBC Highland and advertising copywriter.

While studying for her PhD at Cambridge, Smith wrote several plays which were staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Cambridge Footlights. After some time working in Scotland, she returned to Cambridge to concentrate on her writing, focussing on short stories and freelancing as the fiction reviewer for The Scotsman. In 1995, she published her first book, Free Love and Other Stories, a collection of 12 short stories which won the Saltire First Book of the Year award and Scottish Arts Council Book Award.

She writes articles for The Guardian, The Scotsman, New Statesman and The Times Literary Supplement.