Also appearing during the 16-day event will be Will Self, Zadie Smith, Howard Jacobson and Pat Barker.
Among the 84 signatories were such notables as Naomi Klein, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, Zadie Smith and Sam Lipsyte.
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The list was compiled by Granta, an influential British literary magazine, and also included Zadie Smith, with whom Ms Ali is bound to be compared.
The judging panel included novelist Zadie Smith and artist Gary Hume.
Zadie Smith's work, on the other hand, seemed like a huge unedited morass of family life, reflecting the uncertainty and chaos in the principal characters' lives.
Previous winners of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize have gone on to become major figures in the world of literature, including Louis de Bernieres, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan.
Among the other academicians named at Wednesday's announcement at the British Library in London are AS Byatt, JM Coetzee, Sebastian Faulks, Mark Haddon, David Mitchell, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson.
The list goes on, but over the past few days the rapper has come under fire for comments he made to Zadie Smith for a recent New York Times Magazine story.
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Nick Laird who is married to the Orange Prize for Fiction winner Zadie Smith makes the shortlist for his novel Utterly Monkey, although he had also entered a short book of poetry, To A Fault.
With so many "big" books on the shortlist and well-known favourites like Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro, it was quite exciting to see John Banville slink off with the Man Booker Prize last night.
Sense of the City can be heard on the BBC World Service programme The World Today until Friday 8 August, and includes Orhan Pamuk talking about Istanbul, Romesh Gunesekera on Colombo, and Zadie Smith looking at London.
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