Anna Wilson author page

Anna Wilson biography

Anna Wilson is a British children’s author, editor and writing coach, best known for her picture books and middle-grade fiction. She studied Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University before working as a picture book editor for Macmillan Children’s Books and HarperCollins.

Her first published work was the picture book Over in the Grasslands (Macmillan, 1999). She went on to write the Nina, Fairy Ballerina series (2006–2010) for readers aged 5–8 and was chosen as a World Book Day author in 2010. Her novels for older children include Summer’s Shadow (2015), which was shortlisted for the Lancashire Book of the Year, and The Parent Problem (2016), a title selected for the Summer Reading Challenge.

Wilson has also written the Vlad the World’s Worst Vampire series (2017– ), translated into thirteen languages, and numerous picture books such as The Wide, Wide Sea (2021), Shine Like the Stars (2023), Grandpa and the Kingfisher (2023), and Be Back Soon (2024).

Her non-fiction includes the Nature Month-by-Month almanac series for the National Trust, published between 2018 and 2022, and a memoir, A Place for Everything (2020), which explores her mother’s late‑life autism diagnosis and was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

Wilson teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University, the London Writers’ Salon and the Arvon Foundation. From 2021 to 2023, she served as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Exeter’s Penryn campus.

The most recent milestone in her career is the publication of the board book Be Back Soon by Nosy Crow/Andersen Press in 2024.