Ann was born in the North West and brought up in London. She has lived in places as disparate as a narrowboat in the Midlands and a smallholding on the North York Moors where she learned stockmanship by experiment and brought up three children as a single parent.  During this time she wrote one of the longest-running by-line columns* in the provincial press.

In 1988 Ann started a degree course in English Literature at York, but having left formal education in the sixties she had not realised that the language of critical theory had developed along entirely different lines from that of literature itself and her vocabulary proved inadequate. She was later awarded an MA in the teaching and practice of creative writing, has been a visiting lecturer at Cardiff University and spent eighteen months as writer-in-residence at UWE, Bristol. She has taught at all levels, from Ty Newydd to special needs primary schools and was poet in residence for the Peterloo Poets Schools Poetry Week in 2002. Most recently she has collaborated with photographer Tim Collier on a book of poems celebrating the changing face of the South Wales valleys.

She is an accomplished and popular reader of her own and other people’s work, has reached the final of the Cheltenham All-comers’ Slam and has made recordings for Isis Audiobooks. She is also the author of four volumes of idiosyncratic memoirs (**)

Her four collections of poetry, Between Dryden and Duffy (2005), The Turn of the Cucumber, Gay Science and Backwork, all from Peterloo Poets, have been very well received.

Her first volume was shortlisted at Aldeburgh in 1995.  Individual poems have won prizes in the Manchester, Cardiff, Peterloo, Housman Society, Bridport and National poetry competitions and she is the current holder of the Dylan Thomas Prize for poetry in performance.

*   It began as A Woman’s View from the Clevelands in the Northallerton, Thirsk and Bedale Times and developed into the Country Tales which were a feature of the Yorkshire Evening Post for twenty years.

**  Faint Heart never Kissed a Pig, Sows’ Ears and Silk Purses, Pearls Before Swine all published by Routledge and Kegan Paul and A Pig in a Passage published by  Robert Hale. 

e-mail Ann

and in the shop...
collections -

"Feeling Unusual",
Shoestring Press;

"Between Dryden
and Duffy",
"The Turn of
the Cucumber",
"Gay Science",
and
"Backwork",
 Peterloo Poets

 anthology -
"A Twist of Malice"

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