Anna Mendelssohn Author

Born near Manchester in 1948, Anna Mendelssohn authored poetry, fiction, drama, and life writing; she was also a visual artist, musician, and translator. From 1971 to 1977 she served time at Holloway Prison in London due to her involvement in extreme leftist activism. From the early 1980s, Mendelssohn composed nineteen poetry collections and published in journals receptive to her experimental, charged lyrics, among them, Parataxis, Critical Quarterly, and Jacket. Her work appeared in seminal anthologies including Denise Riley's Poets on Writing (1992), Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos (1996), and Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2004). Often situated within the British Poetry Revival, Mendelssohn retained a marginal, if constant, presence in the poetry community in Cambridge, England, where she lived from 1983 until her death in 2009. In 2010, her vast archive of writings and drawings was generously donated by her three children to Special Collections at the University of Sussex.