Anna Appleby
Anna Appleby was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1993 and tragically lost her Geordie accent in a collision with the South. She floated around looking for a voice but eventually gave up and wrote things down instead. Anna now lives in Greater Manchester where she composes music and shops at Lidl in between writing stories. Her current project is a composition PhD, collaborating with poet Niall Campbell to make an opera.
She started writing as a child but got distracted by music and ended up becoming a professional composer. Having written the libretto for her first opera (Citizens of Nowhere) and a poetry collection for a song cycle (Fridge Poetry), she is now turning back to prose. Funreality is her first published short story.
Q: If you could travel back in time, which of the great writers would you like to meet and why?
A: I wish I’d sent Maya Angelou and Doris Lessing fan mail during that crossover period when we were all alive. I could travel back to the early nineteenth century to meet Elizabeth Barrett Browning because I’m obsessed with her poetry and I’ve set some of it to music… then again, what if she can’t stand my music? Maybe best to avoid the time machine.
Q: What is the first book you remember reading or having read to you as a child?
A: My parents used to read to the three of us a lot, including: Not Now, Bernard; The House at Pooh Corner; The Trouble with Gran; The Hobbit; The Pilgrim’s Progress. Mum did all of the voices.
Q: Is there a book that you keep going back to, and if so, how many times have you read it?
A: Facebook, 90,000 times, and I wish I’d been rereading Three Men in a Boat instead.
Q: If you could teleport yourself anywhere, real or fictional, where would it be and why?
A: The Isle of Iona every weekend because it gives me peace.
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