Anne Bryan's Biography

Anne Bryan started writing  in her middle fifties after going to two funerals at which poems were read. She decided to choose a poem to be read at her funeral but she couldn’t find one which exactly matched her feelings about life and death. Although she hadn’t written a poem for almost forty years, she thought she'd  write one that would fit her life.

Anne’s first poem wasn’t much good but it was satisfying to write, and she was encouraged to continue writing when her second poem received an commendation in a competition in the BBC Wildlife Magazine in 1994. Since then some of Anne’s poems have appeared in magazines, including the New Welsh Review, Fire, Krax, and Tears in the Fence. Anne has always been absorbed by the natural world which she sees as rich in ambiguity, with its ever inventive diversity of life, its intense struggles and conflicts and the endless connections that unify an extraordinary chaos. Since 1988 she has been working with a group of volunteers to maintain the Cwmtalwg Local Nature Reserve near her home.

 Anne enrolled at Creative Writing and Literature classes at the Lifelong Learning Centre at Cardiff University. In 1999 she was awarded a D E Evans prize for a collection of poems and prose, ‘Strange Attractor’ which centred on the legend of Saint Melangell, a Celtic saint whose emblem, like Persephone and Demeter, was the hare. The collection looked at the way Celtic and pagan cultures saw the natural world, and how we could no longer see it in the same way. Her poems explored the controversies that arose when Darwin's theory placed man and animals as close together as Melangell and her hare. Since then Anne has written a number of poems which attempt to see life from the standpoint of what is known of evolution at present, and to explore the interface between science and religion. She was awarded a second DE Evans prize in 2007 for her work in the Lifelong Learning Class 'Writing in the Museum', which meets in the National Museum and Galleries of Wales in Cardiff..

Anne attended an Arvon course on writing for the Internet and then transferred some of the Strange Attractor collection to a web site. Since then the site has changed as Anne's interests and her writing has evolved. Stevie Smith’s poems immediately spoke to Anne when she first read them about 10 years ago, and Stevie’s seriously absurd work continues to fascinate her. In March 2003 Anne and her tutor Jan Carew and fellow students presented ‘An Evening with Stevie Smith,’ when a reading of her poems was linked to episodes in her life. The Stevie Smith section of the web site attracts many visits and has gradually expanded in response to the interest shown by visitors to the site.

Writing essays for the Lifelong Learning courses  encouraged Anne to explore her interest in literature and in the relationship between science, poetry and religion. A number of essays on these subjects are reproduced on these pages: a simple guide to evolution  is a short history of evolutionary ideas,  'Unsung by Singers' considers the scarcity of poems on science. and 'Space with Wordsworth' explores the idea that science is hostile to poetry.  Evolution and religion is a discussion of the impact of evolution on religion. There is also a short biography of Charles Darwin.

Anne was awarded a first class honours degree in Literature with the Open University in 2011 and also working on a book for teenagers on Darwin and his ideas entitled 'Darwin and the Heavenly Rhinoceros' .

Anne maintains pages for Chris Torrance on this web site; and for Jan Carew at  http://www.jan.carew.co.uk They were her tutors, and are now her friends.          
                                             

You may  print any work by Anne Bryan on this or any other page of the web site for your own use or to pass on to a friend, and you may also quote Anne's work in assignments as long as the source is acknowledged. Please don't copy anything from this web site into magazines, newsletters or other web sites without permission or acknowledgement.  Ask for permission by E mail  

Back to Strange Attractor homepage

Darwin biography, as impartial as I can make it, without  fundamentalist 'religious' disapproval or overzealous 'scientific' trumpeting of his work.

A Simple Guide to Evolution - a short history of evolutionary ideas

Evolution and Religion a discussion of the impact of evolution on religion

'Unsung by Singers'  considers the scarcity of poems on science.

'Space with Wordsworth'  explores the idea that science is hostile to poetry.

A Flash of Golden Fire considers the love of nature with reference to a poem by Coleridge, travel writing by the explorer Mungo Park and a sci-fi novel by Philip K Dick.