Ali Shaw

Ali Shaw is a British novelist born in 1981 in Yeovil, Somerset. He studied English at Exeter University and worked in Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford before publishing his debut novel. The Girl with Glass Feet (2009, Atlantic Books) is his debut, set on a remote northern island where a young woman named Ida gradually turns to glass from the feet up and returns to discover the cause, falling in love with the photographer Midas Crook. Part fairy tale, part literary novel, the book won the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. His subsequent novels include The Tree (2016) and The Ragged Shore (2023). Shaw's fiction is characterised by its imaginative richness, its careful world-building, and its blend of the mythological and the realistic. He has been compared to Angela Carter and David Mitchell.