Welcome to my website!​

 

I've always loved historical fiction ever since discovering Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier at a very impressionable age. What's more, my father wrote historical fiction books, and he impressed in me the joy and the value of history and story telling. But also, a little bit of trepidation. I knew becoming an author was possible, but it took me a while to dig in and take my writing seriously. That said, the years I spent not writing, I was always a keen reader and I gained some invaluable life experiences along the way.

 

After graduating with an MA in history, I spent eight years in the British military: including a stint living in Edinburgh Castle (where history is steeped in its frigid stone walls and howls at you from the ramparts); I was posted to Paderborn in Germany; I enjoyed a stint at Chelsea Barracks in London... and in between all these military postings, I served in four operational tours in war-torn Bosnia as a liaison officer, interpreter and running the troops' magazine. During those years, I also shed my rose-tinted, somewhat naive view on life, but I developed a real appreciation of humanity's capacity for compassion,  kindness, resilience and survival. Having had a front row seat in the arena of history-in-the-making, I don't think I'll ever take life's precious gifts for granted again. I want to write the grit as well as the light. I'm particularly interested in shining a light on women in history who've perhaps gone largely unheralded or unnoticed.

 

Never a career officer, I left the army, survived a couple of years in public relations running Microsoft UK's Press Centre, before becoming an English and history teacher. 

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When I’m not teaching now, I'm usually either doggedly tracking down a historical thread, or pulling my hair out trying to translate primary (and secondary) sources written in a foreign language, or trailing after the distant echo of a character from a bygone (but totally riveting) era, or here at my desk trying to conjure the past into words and weave words into a story...

 

Thank you so much for visiting my website. News of my first historical fiction novel is imminent. If you'd like to know more or stay in touch, please join my newsletter or check out my other pages.

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May you love what you read and read what you love!

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Anna

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N.B. In case you spotted some lighthearted upbeat women's contemporary novellas by Anna Foxkirk, yes, that's me too ... While historical fiction is my first love, during the Covid lockdown here in Melbourne, I wrote some fun escapist  'fish-out-of-water' novellas: my Passport to Love series. I think there's a sidenote to them on here somewhere ...