Ali Smith Wins the 2026 Dublin Literary Award for Gliff
There are books that arrive at exactly the right moment. Something in Gliff — Ali Smith's quietly devastating new novel — stopped the literary world in its tracks when it was published, and this week the Edinburgh-born writer received the 2026 Dublin Literary Award, worth €100,000, for a story about two young siblings who fend for themselves after their mother abandons them, eventually finding shelter with a group of squatters at the margins of society.
The Dublin Literary Award is one of the most democratic prizes in world literature: nominations come not from critics in closed rooms but from public libraries across the globe. It is, in the truest sense, a readers' prize. Ali Smith accepted the award at the International Literature Festival Dublin, saying she was «amazed and delighted.» I believe her entirely.
What makes Gliff singular is the way Smith handles abandonment without letting her characters know they are abandoned. The two children do not wait to be saved — they observe, adapt, move through the world with an instinctive intelligence that recalled for me, in an oblique way, certain children in García Márquez: creatures who understand the world before they have the words to name it. Kirkus described the book as «a dark vision brightened by the engaging craft of an inventive writer,» which strikes me as precisely right. There is darkness in Gliff, but there is also an accidental kind of light in the way it is built.
Smith has spent years being one of the most formally daring voices in English literature. Her Seasonal Quartet — Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer — was a bet many thought impossible, published almost in real time during the Brexit years, each novel pressed against the crumbling social fabric of Britain. Gliff continues that exploration from a different angle: instead of looking at a society unraveling, it looks at those who were already outside it and are still, somehow, alive.
The same week the prize was announced, Glyph — the companion novel to Gliff — was released in the United States. Two books conceived in conversation, like two sides of the same argument. Smith has always insisted that literature needs more than one layer of meaning to say what it wants to say. After this Dublin win, the literary world seems finally to be catching up.
If you haven't read Ali Smith yet, there is no better moment. And if you already have, you know this prize is no surprise — it is simply reality catching up to what readers have known for years. Read her.
