Anna Beer is a celebrated author of non-fiction, with biographies of major literary figures such as John Milton and William Shakespeare to her name. She is best-known, however, for her feisty, feminist and accessible accounts of female creatives, including most recently Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature (2022). Her most influential book has been Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music (2016), which has generated numerous creative collaborations from film to live performance. Anna is a long-time Oxford (UK) resident and held, until recently, various posts at the University there, including Director of the Creative Writing MSt. She remains a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College. Her latest book, Death of an Englishman: an Oxford Mystery (2025), marks a move to fiction. The novel (gentle, if not cosy, crime) engages – unsurprisingly given Anna’s interests – with our current culture wars. Anna will be making very clear the cast of Death of an Englishman bear no relation to any person, living or dead….
