Anna Wilson (née Hankey)
Class of 1981

I think I always knew I wanted to write a book. I was certainly trying to write as soon I could hold a pencil. According to my mother, I was trying to copy the alphabet before I was three, making up words by stringing together random letters, just for the pleasure of seeing them appear from my hand. By the time I started at Hilden Oaks in 1975 I was doodling stories in old desk diaries that my grandfather gave me to keep me quiet. I was also reading anything I could lay my hands on. The library in those days was right at the top of the school in the attic, and it was my favourite room in the school. I think the school library laid the foundation for my future career as it was undoubtedly reading that fuelled my passion as a writer. I also became a member of the Puffin Club while I was at Hilden Oaks, and this led me to meet my hero Roald Dahl in person! From that day on, I knew it was the writer’s life for me.

However, once I left Hilden Oaks and went on to Tonbridge Grammar School, the confidence of early childhood left me, and I assumed that I couldn’t call myself a ‘proper writer’ until I was published. I knew that a life ‘in books’ was still the way forward, though. So after obtaining a degree in French and German from Cambridge I applied to publishers for an editorial post. I had decided that, if I couldn’t be an author myself, I could at least be involved in the process of making books. This is how I found myself working for what was then Hodder and Stoughton in Dunton Green. This job was a wonderful start and meant I could continue to live at home.

It wasn’t long before I decided I needed my independence, so I quickly found a new job at Macmillan Children’s Books and moved to London. This is where the path to becoming an author opened up as I was lucky enough to have a boss who noticed that I could write fluently. She encouraged me and gave me the opportunity to write a few books in-house. At last I had the confidence to have a go at writing under my own name, and by the time my first child was born in 1999, I had seen my first book published. Over in the Grasslands was a picture book for 0–3-year-olds and had modest success, so I tried my hand at another. I was still working in-house at this point, so the writing was only ‘a bit of fun’ in between child-rearing and editing. I still didn’t consider myself to be a writer. When It’s a Bear’s Life was published in 2001, I found myself an agent. I assumed I had hit a groove, and that perhaps now I could say ‘I am a picture book writer.’ I wrote reams of picture books for a year or so, but not one of them saw the light of day. I was beginning to think that I had just had a couple of lucky strikes and that perhaps I should give up. By this time, I had had another child and was juggling childcare with freelance editing: more than anything, I needed to earn money.

I started writing longer books—more words equalled more money! And thus Nina, Fairy Ballerina was born, a ten-book series of chapter books for very young readers. This was where I cut my teeth on longer story arcs with larger casts of characters and sub-plots. I had no real idea what I was doing, other than borrowing ideas on plot and structure from the books my daughter liked to read because by then she was reading chapter books. It seemed my writing style was influenced by the sorts of things my children liked to read. So maybe I had become a children’s writer.

This is in fact the way that my writing continued to develop—following in the footsteps of my children’s reading choices. By the time my son was reading alone, I was writing 40,000-word middle-grade novels, mainly about animals as that was what my son was obsessed with. One of these was directly inspired by his excitable plans to build a ‘real-live zoo’ in our garden. Monkey Business was published in 2011 at just the right time for my son to read it to himself. Hard on the heels of this came Summer’s Shadow, my novel for teens, which was again inspired by my daughter and her reading choices.

My agent started to joke that ‘maybe once your kids have grown up, you might turn your hand to writing for adults’. I never saw that as part of the plan. I had long given up on the idea of that serious, heavy-weight novel. However, after Summer’s Shadow was published, both my parents became very sick. I found myself turning from caring for my children to caring for my parents, and all the funny family anecdotes that had inspired my writing up until this point just vanished. Life was not at all funny anymore.

It was around this time that I was offered the opportunity to teach Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. A friend who worked there persuaded me that I could do this. It took a lot of pushing to get me to have a go, as I had done no teaching since my year as a reluctant ‘assistante’ in a French lycée nearly 25 years before. I am forever grateful to this friend for believing in me for, as this has led to many more teaching posts, including that of Royal Literary Fund Fellow for the University of Exeter in Penryn, Cornwall, a post I held for two happy years.

The income I received from teaching allowed me to spend time thinking about how I might write my longest book to date: a memoir about my mother Gillian Hankey entitled A Place for Everything – my mother, autism and me which was published by HarperCollins in 2020. This was the year my daughter turned 21. So it seems that my agent’s prediction was correct: my writing had finally grown up with my children!

However, things have come full circle, as out of this memoir came another picture book for children, my first for 20 years. Grandpa and the Kingfisher, illustrated by Sarah Massini, was published in 2023. It is about my dad Martin Hankey and my grief at losing him. It is also about the life-cycle of a kingfisher (a bird we used to spot together on the Medway) and the hope that new life brings. Bringing this story to life has encouraged me to have a go at writing more for this age group again, and I have since published two other picture books and have another coming out later this year about swallow migration entitled Be Back Soon, illustrated by Jenny Bloomfield. I feel therefore as though my writing life, rather like the kingfisher’s in my book, has come full circle. And the subject matter, coming as it has from my childhood, has brought me back to Tonbridge where my love of books began.

You can find me on Instagram @acwilsonwriter and my website is www.annawilson.co.uk