Ali Smith, the Scottish poet and fiction writer (born in Inverness, 1962) was the author of one novel and two collections of short stories when she published

in 2001. It was critically acclaimed and won the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award; it was on the shortlists for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Orange Prize for [women’s] Fiction. (Smith is a much-nominated author who has been on the shortlist for the Orange Prize again in 2006 and 2015, and on the Booker shortlist in 2005, 2013, and 2017.)

The title is a characteristic bit of Smith wordplay, one of her most distinctive authorial traits. The setting is a hotel in an unnamed Northern post-industrial city in England, called the Global Hotel. In a way, though, that hotel is a world, or a metonymy for a

2805 words

Citation: Moseley, Merritt. "Hotel World". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 March 2025 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=31154, accessed 01 April 2025.]