Anna Robinson has been writing poetry for some time and in 2001 was the first recipient of the Poetry School Scholarship. A former tutor in prisons, Anna is one of the regular poetry judges for the Koestler Competition.

Her first publication is Songs from the flats (Hearing Eye). Set on a housing estate in South London, it explores themes of home and rebellion within an urban dream-time.   This was selected by the Poetry Book Society as their Pamphlet Choice in Winter 2005/6.  Anna is one of the poets to be included in the next Oxford Poets edition from Oxford/Carcanet.

Anna has had a number of poetry residencies, working with children, older people, the learning disabled and prisoners. She was poet in residence on Lower Marsh for the South Bank Centre’s Trading Places project, part of Poetry International 2006. She co-runs Poetry Parlour at Crockatt and Powell bookshop with Fawzia Kane.

She has an MA from Ruskin College in Oxford in Public History and currently works part time as a Reader Development Librarian.

Pansy Neilson’s Magnificent

This is not the leper house,
it’s not here that lesions creep
through a bright red haze.

That’s on the other side –
where they’ve put builders’-huts
over the football pitch.

What is this haze – smudging out
from the blotch to form a margin?
It’s red as in heart not iron

or blood, a red too Victorian
to stand for this place,
too red for the likes of us.

Anna Robinson

from sequence The Pansy Poems

previously published in Reactions 4 (2003)

and in pamphlet collection Songs from the Flats (2005).

Hearing Eye, ISBN 1-905082-01-0