Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and went on to study at the University of Aberdeen, and then Newnham College, Cambridge. She taught at the University of Strathclyde before becoming a full-time writer. She has received much critical acclaim for her work: Smith's first publication, a short story collection entitled Free Love and Other Stories (1995), won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award; her 2001 novel, Hotel World, was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction; and her third novel, The Accidental, won the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award. Margaret Tait was a filmmaker and writer. She published three books of poetry and two collections of short stories (one of them for children), and made thirty-two short films and the feature-length Blue Black Permanent (1992). She was born in Orkney in 1918. After qualifying in medicine at Edinburgh University in 1941, she joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in India, Sri Lanka and Malaya, before returning to Orkney in 1946. In the 1960s she moved back to her native Orkney where she continued to make films until her death in 1999. Sarah Neely is a member of the Stirling Media Research Institute and a lecturer in Film in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling. Her research stretches across a range of areas of film and media studies and her most recent work focuses on Scottish cinema and experimental film. She has researched and written on the work of Margaret Tait for several years.