Anna Vaught is an English teacher, mentor and author of several books, including 2020’s novel ‘Saving Lucia’ and short fiction collection, ‘Famished’; 2023 saw ‘Saving Lucia’ published to national acclaim in Italy as ‘Bang Bang Mussolini’, memoir ‘These Envoys of Beauty’ and the magical realism novel ‘The Zebra and Lord Jones’, her first teaching book, ‘The Alchemy’, plus the Curae anthology of short prose from the winning entrants to the prize she established in 2023 for writer-carers; next year sees her first essay collection, ‘To Melt the Stars’.
Anna’s shorter and multi-genre works are widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies. She has been a columnist for Mslexia and The Bookseller. With a background in secondary English, mentoring with young people and community arts, Anna is now a guest university lecturer, tutor for Jericho Writers and teaches occasionally at secondary level. She works alongside chronic illness and is a passionate campaigner for mental health provision and SEND support for young people. She is a PhD candidate at York St John from December 2023-4, undertaking a PhD by Published Works on Magical Realism and Trauma, foregrounding her own work. Her title begins with a quotation from her memoir: ‘Go there on a wing in your imagination: Magical Realism and imagination as therapeutic writing in Saving Lucia and These Envoys of Beauty.’
She is currently writing an extended nonfiction study, ‘A Cultural and Emotional History of Lipstick’, and completing a new novel, ‘All the Days I did not Live’. She is particularly sympathetic to writers working alongside significant additional challenges in whatever form and is passionate about all elements of access – for example for writers who are dyslexic or dyspraxic.
Anna loves working with writers of literary and commercial fiction and book group fiction (particularly gothic, magical realism and historic), and short story collection, with a keen interest more broadly in speculative fiction, YA and MG; she would also enjoy finding a mentee working on autobiographical fiction.