Anna Crowe was born in Plymouth in 1945, spent part of her childhood in France and has lived most of her adult life in Scotland. She is married and has three children and five grandchildren.
Anna started writing in the early eighties, encouraged first by Cynthia Fuller and Jon Silkin in Newcastle, by Anne Stevenson, and later by Douglas Dunn in St Andrews. She was a runner-up in the National Poetry Competition in 1986 and winner of the Peterloo Poetry Competition in 1993 and 1997. She has had collections published by Peterloo and Arc, and pamphlets published by Mariscat. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and has been translated into Catalan, Spanish, Italian and German.
In 1998 Anna was involved in establishing the StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews, acting first as chair of the organizing committee and then for seven years as the artistic director. She is now Joint Honorary Presdident of StAnza, and serves on the Board of Trustees. For fifteen years she ran a poetry workshop in St Andrews.
As a trained linguist, Anna has always had a strong interest in translating, mainly from Catalan and Castilian, but also from French, Portuguese and Italian. Her translations have been read at festivals and published in Britain and Catalonia.
In 2017 Anna recorded an hour-long reading for the Poetry Archive.
Anna Crowe 