Anna Jackson is a poet, fiction and non-fiction writer who grew up in Auckland and now lives in Island Bay, Wellington, where she lectures at Victoria University. She completed an MA at the University of Auckland, and went on to complete her doctorate at Oxford University. Her thesis ‘A Poetics of the Diary’ examines the diary writing of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and others.

Jackson’s first collection of poetry appeared in the three-poet collection AUP New Poets 1 (1999). This was followed by a solo poetry collection, The Long Road to Teatime (AUP, 2000), which explored themes of family and domestic life. Her fiction has appeared in an array of journals, including the anthology The Picnic Virgin (1999) edited by Emily Perkins. She was highly commended in the 1999 Landfall essay competition. Her fifth collection, Thicket (Auckland UP, 2011), was shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Book Awards (2012), while The Pastoral Kitchen (Auckland UP, 2001) was shortlisted for the Montana Book Awards (2002).

Jackson received the Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary (1999), was named the Waikato University Writer-in-Residence (2001), won the Louis Johnson New Writer’s Award (2000), and was recent recipient of the prestigious Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (2016). In 2017 she was awarded a residency at the Michael King Centre in Auckland. Anna has been described by writer Sarah Quigley as ‘that rare thing – a true original’.