Anne Simpson is a Canadian poet and novelist.
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Simpson received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Queen’s University, and she also graduated in Fine Arts from OCAD University (formerly the Ontario College of Art). [1] Subsequently, she worked as a CUSO volunteer English teacher for two years in Nigeria. She teaches part-time at St. Francis Xavier University, where she established the Writing Centre, and she continues to do some work for the Coady International Institute at StFX.
She was the co-winner of the 1997 Journey Prize, awarded for her short story Dreaming Snow. Her second collection of poetry, Loop (2003), was the winner of the 2004 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. Loop has been reviewed as containing "bleak, well-wrought poems about history’s nightmares [as] Simpson conducts exhumations and postmortems, and tracks the scars of the human record" [2]. Her other poetry collections include Light Falls Through You (2000), Quick (2007), and Is (2011). Her second novel, Falling (2008),a Canadian bestseller, was the winner of the Dartmouth Fiction Award [3]. It was long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has also written a book of essays on poetics, The Marram Grass: Poetry and Otherness (2009).
She has been the writer-in-residence at a number of institutions, including the University of New Brunswick, the Medical Humanities Program at Dalhousie University, the Saskatoon Public Library, the University of Prince Edward Island, and, most recently, Dalhousie University. She has also been a faculty member at the Banff Centre. She lives in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.