Getting Virginia Woolf’s Goat: A Lecture by Ali Smith by NPGLondon

On 23 October 2014, novelist Ali Smith gave a talk at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on wit, playfulness, lightfootedness and mischief in Woolf's life and work, with special reference to her relationship with the friend and writer who, it might be said, most got Woolf's goat: Katherine Mansfield.

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her first book, Free Love, won the Saltire First Book Award. She is also the author of Like (1997); Other Stories and Other Stories (1999); Hotel World (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award, the East England Arts Award of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002; The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003); The Accidental (2005), which won the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize; and The First Person and Other Stories (2008).Her latest books are There But For The (2011), winner of the Hawthornden Prize, Artful (2012), winner of the Foyles / Bristol Festival of Ideas Best Book 2013, and, forthcoming, the novel How To Be Both (2014).

The Virginia Woolf: Art Life and Vision Adult Learning Programme is made possible in loving memory of Rosemary Evison.