Anna grew up in one of the parts of Cheltenham unlikely to feature on postcards. After an unorthodox adolescence that involved more scholarships and boarding-school encounters with princesses than are normally found outside the pages of novels, she took up following the Manic Street Preachers around the country for a hobby (in the Richey days, when they were good, mind) before heading to Oxford to study English, followed by Russian Studies at UCL.

She worked variously as a secretary, a magazine assistant, a live TV subtitler, a newspaper sub-editor, and a government media monitor before settling down to edit children’s and YA books at publishers such as Hachette and Egmont. In 2021 she published her first novel, Rapids, which is about a girl with bipolar disorder who has no intention of letting that – or anything else – slow her down.