Anna Smaill

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-18

Anna Smaill was born in April 1979 in Auckland, New Zealand. She began playing violin at age seven and initially pursued musical performance at the University of Canterbury before turning to writing. She earned a master's degree in English from the University of Auckland, a master's in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington's International Institute of Modern Letters, and later a PhD in contemporary American poetry from University College London. She worked as a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Hertfordshire from 2009 to 2012 and lived in Tokyo, Japan, from 2004 to 2006; she is known for writing her drafts in longhand before typing them up. Her poetry collection The Violinist in Spring appeared in 2006. Her debut novel, The Chimes (2015), imagines a dystopian future London where written language has been outlawed and memory is instead encoded and transmitted through music; the novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in October 2016. Her second novel, Bird Life, was published in 2023 and was longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Smaill married novelist Carl Shuker in 2010, whom she met at Victoria University; the couple have one daughter.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Chimes (2015) · The Chimes Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 1 book
• Award recognitions across all universes: 1 (1 won)

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