Anna Selby

Anna Selby is a writer, researcher, and naturalist. Her most recent chapbook, Field Notes, written in and under the Atlantic Ocean over three years (using waterproof notebooks) was a bestseller for two years running with The London Review of Books Bookshop, was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and was an Irish Times Book of the Year. 

She was a Lecturer in Engaged Ecology and Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College, was one of the judges for the 2022 Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, was editor of environmental, feminist publisher, Hazel Press and is doing a Practice-Based PhD on Empathy, Ecology and Plein Air Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. She specialises in intersectional environmentalism, poetry in translation, international activist and environmental writing - formerly working at the UK’s first Literature House, The National Centre for Writing, and as Literature and Spoken Word Programmer at Southbank Centre, where she organised the largest poetry festival in the world, Poetry Parnassus. 

Anna has been Writer-in-Residence at Cambridge Conservation Initiative, The Wordsworth Trust, and Wealden Literary Festival. Her poetry often explores our connection with water and the living world. She writes poetic-studies of different species in-situ, directly from life, often underwater or at sea, and aims for these poems to share a sense of compassion and attentiveness to the environment. She also works on cross-artform, poetry-dance and multi-disciplinary pieces that tour the UK and collaborates with dancers, choreographers and conservationists.