Anne is the founder of poetry p f and a provider of technical and administrative services to poets and poetry organisations. She is the Poetry Society’s ‘Kent North West’ Stanza Rep, President of the Shortlands Poetry Circle, and Administrator for Second Light Network. She was the visiting poet at a London care-centre for two and a half years.

 

Her work has been widely published in anthologies, incl. Poems for the Year 2020 (Shoestring Press, 2021), Locked Down (Poetry Space, 2021), World Poetic & Artistic Anthology (Editura Pim, 2021), and Poets Meet Politics (Hungry Hill, 2022), as well as group anthologies (in 2023, Enfield Poets and Shortlands Poetry Circle Writers). Her poetry has won the Bridport Prize, the Southport Poetry Competition and Poetry on the Lake’s ‘Silver Wyvern’ (Italy). She is a Hawthornden Fellow and, in 2023, she received a Poetry on the Lake special award, a ‘Bronze Wyvern’, for services to poetry.

 

Her UK full collections are The Janus Hour (Oversteps Books, 2010) and The Last Parent (Second Light Publications, 2019 – see more, including offer for Book Clubs, and order forms, at Second Light. In 2023, Eikon (Bucharest) published her latest (her 3rd) bi-lingual collection (Eng/Rom) any minute now / în orice clipă, translated by award-winning translator, Prof. Dr. Lidia Vianu.

 

She has an MA (Dist) in Creative Writing from Sheffield Hallam University. In a review of the Ten Hallam Poets anthology (Mews Press 2005, eds Steven Earnshaw, E A Markham, Sean O’Brien), Roddy Lumsden said (Poetry London, 2006) that “[her] tight poem ‘More’ is one of the best in the volume”. Don Paterson, that “TEN HALLAM POETS represents one of the most astonishing constellations of poetic talent to have emerged in the last ten years … from the whole of the UK”.

 

A strong Romanian connection has arisen through poetry p f’s translation projects with the University of Bucharest. She has led three delegations in visits to work with students of the university’s translation programme (2016-2018) and, in 2017, a small collection of 17 poems, Let It Come to Us All, was published in English/Romanian, translations by Prof Dr Lidia Vianu, in print by Integral (Bucharest) and in an illustrated online version by Contemporary Literature Press (Bucharest).

 

A small collection of 25 poems, Only Here till Friday was also published in bilingual editions by Bibliotecha Universalis in Bucharest; English/Romanian in 2015 and English/Spanish in 2016.

 

from the foreward of any minute now:

 

[Anne Stewart] builds poetry on the thought of an emotion. … Anne’s main ally is, of course, language. But the words means more, or different, than the same words used by others. Each word is like a curtain. … [she] veils her discretion in narratives. She tells a story. Apparently. When the story is over, you realise that the incidents themselves are irrelevant. What matters is those ambiguous words, whose dark face, hard to uncover, weighs on your soul. … It is not easy to write a poem which … voices the unutterable. … And, yes, Anne does this: in this whole volume, she takes the curtain from our soul. Without our realising how.
 

translator Prof. Dr. Lidia Vianu
 

Comment on The Last Parent:

 

I love the way, in The Lost Dead, Anne does not flinch from the macabre humour that can creep into dreadful situations, to help us through. This whole poem is special, I was stunned by it, and it’s immediately followed by The Inevitable Truth of Love, where the poem sings itself into some other space entirely … look out specially for “my grief a sack of fists still blindly hammering…” and the choices to be made in Organise The Funeral And Wake … this collection has moved me greatly.
 

Caroline Carver (on eponymous long poem sequence)
 

In this remarkable collection of two voices, Anne Stewart’s passionate poems chronicle the mechanics of handling the Administration after her father’s death. Intertwined, she skilfully weaves poems of loss – her artistically crafted elegies, paying homage to her parents.
 

Peter Phillips (on eponymous long poem sequence)
 

Comment on The Janus Hour:

 

Anne Stewart’s poetry is characterised by a view of the world that is quizzical, appraising, unflinching yet non-judgemental: this is how things look from here, it says; take it or leave it. Her poems address, with the same deft lightness of touch, both uncomfortable truths about our time and the surreal in the everyday, achieving a rare consistency of expression without ever being predictable.
 

Jeremy Page, editor, The Frogmore Papers
 

The Janus Hour is strong, resourceful and varied, dominated by its music and a sense of quest for survival, for the light behind the clouds. Mercurial, like a Fellini film.
 

Katherine Gallagher
 

Anne Stewart is a highly skilled poet whose poetry can be highly disturbing. Her sonnets, terza rima and other poems are beautifully wrought, yet her subject matter is very near the bone. Mothers, sisters, deaths in the family and a ‘list of cruelties’ are prominent in this book, which is essential reading for all interested in women’s poetry.
 

Merryn Williams, editor, The Interpreter’s House
 

Anne’s poem Still Water, Orange, Apple, Tea… won the 2008 Bridport Prize. Listen to the poem on Anne’s website.
 
Read Interview & Poems (Eng/Rom) by Elena Arma at the Translation Café
 
more poems at Anne’s website