Anna Crowe UK

Anna Crowe was born in Plymouth, and educated in France and Sussex. She studied French and Spanish at the University of St Andrews where she now lives, working as a writer and translator. She has also been a primary school teacher, taught at the former Bede Monastery Museum in Jarrow, and worked for many years in the Quarto, the much-missed second-hand bookshop. She has tutored for the Open Association of St Andrews University and for the Open College of the Arts, and ran a poetry workshop for almost twenty years.

With others, in 1998 she founded StAnza, Scotland's Poetry Festival, was Artistic Director for the first seven years, and still serves as Honorary President on the Board of Trustees.

Her work includes two Peterloo collections, Skating Out of the House and Punk with Dulcimer, and three Mariscat chapbooks, A Secret History of Rhubarb, Figure in a Landscape (a PBS pamphlet Choice and winner of the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award) and Finding My Grandparents in the Peloponnese. She won the Peterloo Poetry Competition in 1993 and again in 1997, and has been a runner-up in the National Poetry Competition. She was awarded the Elmet Prize in 2018. Her work has been translated into Catalan, Spanish, German and Italian, including two of her collections: Punk with Dulcimer into Castilian by the Catalan poet, Joan Margarit, Punk con salterio, (Cosmopoética, 2008), and Figure in a Landscape into Catalan, as Paisatge amb figura (Ensiola, 2011), inspiring a series of lithographs by the Mallorcan sculptor, Andreu Maimó; and into Spanish by the Mexican poet, Pedro Serrano, and published in Mexico as Figura en un paisaje (El oro de los tigres 2018).

Books of translation include an anthology of Catalan poems, Miralls d'aigua / Light off water, a joint Carcanet / Scottish Poetry Library publication; work by the Catalan poet, Joan Margarit, Tugs in the fog (awarded a PBS Recommendation in 2006), Strangely happy and Love is a Place (all published by Bloodaxe); Barcelona Amor Final: anthology of poems about the city of Barcelona by Joan Margarit in Catalan, Castilian and English (Proa 2007); No hi ha treva per a les fúries (with Joan Margarit): translations into Catalan of poems by RS Thomas, (Proa 2013); Six Catalan Poets, Peatlands, poems by the Mexican poet, Pedro Serrano, and Lunarium, poems by the Mallorcan poet, Josep Lluís Aguiló (all published in parallel text by Arc). Her translations of the work of the Catalan poet, Manuel Forcano, Maps of Desire, is forthcoming from Arc in 2019. In 2006 she received a Travelling Scholarship from the Society of Authors, to further her work of translation.

She enjoys collaborating with professionals in other disciplines - painters, sculptors, textile artists, jewellers and calligraphers. Her poetry has been recorded for the Poetry Archive and is available at www.poetryarchive.org One of the things that drives her need to write is the desire to rescue obscure stories and give a voice to things that might otherwise have no voice and be forgotten or overlooked.

She lives in St Andrews with her partner, Dr Julian Crowe. They have three grown-up children and five grandchildren.

(2019)