THE acclaimed Scottish writer Ali Smith has spoken how she feels the world is living through the unreal"theatre" of Donald Trump's presidency.

Ms Smith, the award winning author of books such as Hotel World, Autumn and How to Be Both, told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that the presidency of President Donald Trump did not seem real.

She said: "I feel like Trump is like theatre, that he is not even really the President, and there is theatre happening.

"Every day we go 'aah' when something shocking happens, but something else is happening behind Trump.

"It is like the backdrop has come to the front of the stage, and that is what we are watching."

She added: "It is all our problem, all of use have to deal with that front drop, what western culture is doing."

Autumn has been described as one of the first 'post-Brexit' novels, but Smith said the roots of the Brexit vote have been growing for a long time in the UK.

The writer and academic, originally from Inverness, said she felt we were living in "times which are asking us to be psychotic".

On Brexit, she said: "The catalyst has been happening for a long time, was been happening all along, and has taken a shape because of the deep division in our society.

"That vote we had last year, and the vote we had this year too, pointed up the divisions, which no one is going out of their way to help or to solve or to heal.

"We have had a whole year of no one going out of their way to solve or heal, those particular divisions.

"The things that were already in place became very visible, appeared in the large structure which Brexit is now going to be, which seems to have appeared over night.

"The monolith of Brexit, it was there all along, and its roots were deep and are deep.

"So the book was always about division, and a society deciding about other people."

Smith, whose novel Autumn, the first part of a series of four novels linked to the seasons, had been lauded, also read the first two pages of her new book for the first in public.

She read from Winter to the packed audience, a book she said she finished writing last weekend.

Ms Smith spoke of how important was for her to see her books translated, and how it was key for her to see her books published in another language.

"Language is a family," she said, "there is another reason why borders are mad, because all of the languages, are related, and it is all [the same] DNA fabric."