Anna Selby is a poet and naturalist. She works collaboratively with conservationists, and is doing a PhD on Plein Air Poetry, Empathy and Ecology at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing Masters at the University of East Anglia. Her poetry often explores our connection with water and the natural world. She writes poetic-studies of different species in-situ, directly from life, often underwater, and aims for these poems to share a sense of compassion and attentiveness to the environment. Born in Shropshire in 1982 to a Canadian artist and a British minimalist, she was one of four writers selected from the UK to travel to Bangladesh with the British Council as part of a writing exchange project with young Bangladeshi writers. In 2011, she was shortlisted for an Eric Gregory Award. A specialist in contemporary international poetry, she previously worked as Literature and Spoken Word Co-ordinator at London's Southbank Centre and as an associate artist of dance-film company, State of Flux. She is co-editor with Neil Astley of The World Record: international voices from Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus (Bloodaxe Books/Southbank Centre, 2012). Her poetry collections include two pamphlets, The Burning (Salt Publishing, 2013) and Field Notes (Hazel Press, 2020).
