Anne Pia

DR ANNE PIA (born in 1949) lives in Edinburgh. She is the grandchild of Italian immigrants and was raised surrounded by the culture, traditions and dialect of southern Italy. She is a professional linguist and translator. Anne attended St Margaret’s Convent School from 1954 until 1967. She graduated from Edinburgh University with a joint Honours degree in French and Italian, and a Dip.Ed and began her teaching career in Glasgow. She subsequently took up a number of senior leadership and national roles in both the schools and adult education sectors, and retired from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate in 2009, having gained a PhD from Edinburgh University in 2008, while still in post.

Anne Pia’s creative memoir Language of My Choosing was shortlisted for the Saltire Award for Best New Book of 2017. In 2018, Anne was awarded the Premio Flaiano Italianistica: La Cultura Italiana nel Mondo.The Italian translation Ho Scelto La Mia Lingua was published in 2018 together with her first poetry collection, Transitory. Sheis a winner of the Crawford Gallery, Cork, Flash Fiction Competition 2021.

Keeping Away The Spiders; Essays on Breaching Barriers was published in November 2020 by Luath Press, and her second poetry collection The Sweetness of Demons with translations from French, was published by Vagabond Voices in April 2021on the 200th anniversary of Baudelaire’s birth. Dragons Wear Lipstick her poetry pamphlet was published by Dreich in November 2022. She has read at the Stanza International Poetry Festival, the Dundee Literary Festival, the Paisley and Portobello Book Festivals. Anne is listed in the Scottish Poetry Library Catalogue of Scottish Poets and is a regular contributor to poetry and literary gatherings in Edinburgh and more widely in Scotland. In 2018 she was a guest lecturer at the British Institute in Florence. In 2022 she was invited to join the Judging panel for the Scottish National Book Awards.