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Anna Swan is a freelance writer and editor, and has contributed to the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, TLS, Mail on Sunday, London Review of Books and the Big Issue, among others.
She was born in 1960 and educated at Christ’s Hospital. In her early 20s she left London for New York where she attended the State University.
Statues without Shadows, her first book, is an exposé of ambition and self-destruction in 1950s literary London where her parents, Michael and Joan Swan, followed a romantic and ruinous path to their early deaths.
This study of a vanished era also explores the ghost relationship between parents who die too young and the children they leave behind to untangle the family myths. A dark story told with a light touch and black humour, Statues without Shadows won the Biographers’ Club Prize and was short-listed for the J.R. Ackerley Prize, and is now out in paperback from Hodder & Stoughton.
Anna lives in West Hampstead.
how I found the agency
"Andrew Lownie was recommended to me by the novelist and critic Francis King, whose friend Jonathan Fryer is a client. Following our first meeting I knew I was in safe hands. As a biographer himself, his experience and knowledge are priceless, and his feedback (alongside reports from an expert team of readers) straightforward, constructive and inspiring. My book, Statues without Shadows, was rejected by seven publishers first time round. Resolute and steadfast, Andrew painstakingly helped me rework the proposal, and it was published by Hodder in July 2005. As one of his clients said recently, "When Andrew believes in a book he won't give up until it's commissioned."subscribe to agency's newsletter
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