RESULTS

'I was born in the year of the supersonic, the era of the multi-storey multivitamin multitonic, the highrise time of men with the technology and women who could be bionic, when jump jets were Harrier, when QE2 was Cunard, when thirty-eight feet tall the Princess Margaret stood stately in her hoverpad, the annee erotique was only thirty aircushioned minutes away and everything went at twice the speed of sound. I opened my eyes. It was all in colour. It didn't look like Kansas anymore. The students were on the barricades, the mode was maxi, the Beatles were transcendental. It was Britain. It was great.'

Ali Smith's Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes in 2001. In this new novel, she goes even further in developing her unique and brilliant literary voice.

Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's re-mix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, Girl meets boy is a myth of metamorphosis for the modern world.

A collection of short stories that share the same theme - examining the distances and connections between people.

As editors Toby Litt and Ali Smith explain in their introduction: 'newness is quite a venerable category. There's not much that's new about it. In the 1930s, when a magazine called New Writing was first published, it had to compete with New Signatures, New Country, New Verse, the Statesman and Nation and New Theatre, and what with the New Woman of the 1890s and new everything else, even then, new wasn't the new new... If we've achieved diversity, it's because our submissions were themselves diverse; and the final selection is representative of the proportion of short stories to novel extracts, poems and essays that were submitted. Originality is only proven over time, paradoxically. We are confident that some of the names here you've never heard before will become very familiar. They may even disgrace themselves by winning prizes, becoming established, etc. But they'll be the kinds of writer, like the known names published here, for whom everything they write is a renewal - of language, of place, of the senses and of the contemporary.'