ANTHEA SIMMONS (UK)

Anthea is the eldest of six and a Vicar’s daughter. She grew up in Cornwall and Devon, an academic, book-mad, horse-obsessed child. After gaining an M.A. in English Language and Literature from St Hugh’s College, Oxford University, Anthea went to work in the City of London as one of the first women stockjobbers...an excellent grounding for the competitive rough and tumble of the sharp end of the financial services industry. In a high-flying career that spanned 23 years, her last role was as Head of UK Institutional Business at Gartmore Asset Management. During that time, her writing was confined to articles in the financial press... in fact, that city career was very possibly a very grand bit of displacement activity!

Widowed in 2000, she quit the City in 2001 to move permanently to the country with her young son, Henry. After a year of doing little more than messing about with horses, she started teaching English at a small prep school. Plays, poems and Shakespeare adaptations got her back in the creative groove and after four lovely years, she decided to write full time. Share, a children’s picture book, written on an Arvon Foundation course tutored by Malachy Doyle, was taken up by Andersen Press and published in September 2010. The poetry collection had been growing steadily, inspired by a rural existence as far removed from the glitz and glam of London as it is possible to be. The menagerie grew. From cats and horses to rescue hens, exquisite Belgian Bantams, a pair of KuneKune pigs and the glorious Mr P, the peacock, twice widowed, sadly... thanks to Mr Charles Fox. A profound love of and delight in words joins forces with the daily inspiration afforded by the animals, driving her to write the poems which chronicle life in the depths of the countryside.

Having completed Pig Nuts and Peacocks, Anthea is working on an emotional and intellectual response to that simple triumvirate of earthly experience: Life, Death, Love.

Anthea’s poems have appeared in Acumen and The Marshwood Vale Magazine and Ex-Batts was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2009, having been long-listed for the Plough Prize in the same year.