Ali Smith recently published ‘Hotel World’, a novel about five women and the ways that they interconnect with each other, set against the backdrop of a bland business hotel. I enjoyed the book so much that I wanted to ask its author some questions. Luckily for me she agreed to answer them.

Did the sensitivity with which you wrote about the death of a young woman in ‘Hotel World’ come out of any personal experiences?
Kind of, not directly. I mean, my mother died eleven years ago. It doesn`t sound like it`d be the same, it isn`t directly related, but that`s my experience of the death of a close love, and it`s an experience - I`ve found - that changes rather than lessens in impact as time passes. I see the book as fundamentally rooted to this, though really when I think about it, it also comes out of inadequate reading experiences. I read a lot of books which are supposed to be about love, or death, and they don`t come near the crucial fractures and reawakenings that both bring us.

Also, when I was beginning the book I was reading supposedly literary novels where gay characters who were perfectly nice and lovely etc, such good friends with the straight people who were the main characters in the novels, were killed off. Like little sacrifices to the survival of the straight. I realised I wanted to write something that was about what happens when someone full of potential is robbed of it, both by early demise and people`s deathly labelling.

Why did you mix real and non-real elements together in this novel?
I think it was because I believe that the conjunct, the connection, of the real and the imagination is vital for transformation of both.

I thought that the novel was a bit like a film, the changing perspectives being like a roving camera. What do you think?
I agree, now that I can see the book more clearly. One interviewer suggested it moves like Kieslowski, and I think that`s an inspired reading of it - though I don`t imagine it reaches the aesthetic comforts and the Catholic surenesses Kieslowski can pull out of the coincidental connections he makes at the end of his trilogy. It wouldn`t be surprising to me if it`s filmic - I love films! But I also love books, and hope it`s a real book-reader`s book. And the changing perspective is one of the main insistences of the book, that we have to move through different voices, become open to difference - important to engage a reader in an act that`s involving, dramatic, actually and practically part of the action, not just audience to it.

What is it about homeless women and journalists that made you want to include two as central characters?
They are the upper and lower echelons of the class system as we now have it. Else is beyond class in one way, Penny is beyond class in another. They`re part of what looks like an unshiftable series of inequalities and disenfranchisements. Their relationship is really about power, and who has it. It`s Else`s power to leave a tap running in a hotel bathroom, that`s all she can do. It`s Penny`s power, and this is why she`s also a journalist, to change things if she chooses.

Of course, Else and Penny seem stereotypical partly because that`s the book`s point, that everybody is trapped and disenfranchised by role. Everybody in the book is stereotypical in some way. I suppose its main theme is the stultifying boxes we all get put in, and whether we can ever get out of them or not.

Is there anything else you`d like to say?
Thank you for such good questions.

Stop press! Ali Smith has just been shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Read our review of Hotel World.

Buy Ali Smith`s `Hotel World` online and save money.