My Writing
Poetry
Since spring 2024, I’ve been publishing poetry about my experiences in Ukraine. My work has appeared in a number of magazines, including Magma and Poetry Salzburg, as well as placing in national competitions. My first pamphlet, Landscape With Mines, was published by Mica Press in December 2025.
Reviews
“Few in the West pay attention to Ukraine, but Anna Bowles really sees it.”
– Kateryna Babkina
“With startling clarity, precise imagery, and dry wit, Bowles’s razor-sharp poems draw on her experiences with soldiers and civilians in Ukraine. Her work reminds us why we read poetry, as she captures that which is too painful or inexplicable to be contained in ordinary language, and strikes right at the core of our complacence.”
– Rosamund Taylor
“These staccato and flickering poems skilfully show us the impossible detail of invasion, its vast and tiny harms, and the resistance it engenders. ‘The shock the shock the shock’ of those the poet cares for is vividly recorded in sharply-phrased language. The pamphlet’s fast-paced, hard-to-forget lines find a very personal way for an outsider to convey the forms war takes – from ‘the land’s heave of grief’ to a ‘savourless calm’ near breaking point, how time and normality distort, how ‘everyone has started to look like the war’. This is memorable writing, both harsh and caring, full of love and outrage.”
– Judy Brown
“Direct, surreal, haunting: in these closely observed and darkly moving poems, Anna Bowles snatches Russia’s war out of the news and drops it right in front of your heart’s eye.”
– Julian Evans, author of Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War
Read ‘We Are Not In This Field’ and ‘Prom Queen Ukraine’ here.
I’m keen to further the understanding of the Ukrainian cause as much as possible, so if you would like to use any of my poetry to this end, please get in touch and depending on the context I might give permission for it to be used for free. All copyright will remain with me.
Rapids
My YA novel, Rapids, came out in May 2021 from ZunTold Press. It follows fangirl, aspiring hat-maker and serial enthusiast Yan Harris as she tears through life, London, friendship, deadbeat dads and bipolar disorder.
Buy it from Waterstones
Buy it from Bookshop.org
Buy it from Amazon
Reviews
“You don’t want to miss this story, it will hit you like a tidal wave.”
– Lucas Maxwell, UK School Librarian of the Year 2017
“It’s impossible not to fall in love with Yan.”
– Tabitha Suzuma, author of Forbidden and A Note of Madness
“Authentic, dazzling and a vivid demonstration of why neurodivergent ‘own voices’ are so important.”
– Eric Lindstrom, author of Not if I See You First and A Tragic Kind of Wonderful
“Witty, inventive and incredibly immersive. Yan is a brilliant, heart-breaking character.”
– Elen Caldecott, author of The Short Knife