About Anne Lister

Anne is best known as a songwriter, with songs such as “Icarus”, “Demeter’s Daughter”, “Stone Circles”, “The Quiet People”, and “May Morning” having been picked up by singers around the world. She started “making up” songs as a child, taking it further once she had her first guitar at the age of 12, and then started singing in front of audiences from the age of 16. At one point, when she was 17, an agent suggested she could be the “British Joni Mitchell”, but as he was just a tad creepy and she had a place waiting for her at university she didn’t follow through.

The problem has been that she has always had several conflicting passions. One is of course the music. Another is the telling of myths, legends and other stories. And another is medieval storytelling, especially (but not exclusively) stories about King Arthur. Tied into all of this has been the need to actually make some money to pay for necessities, and so she has spent a good part of her life teaching and, where needed, doing random office jobs. Inevitably all of this experience and all of these passions feed into her music – and then in the 90s she met a woman who enabled her to clarify her underlying inspiration. This was a woman who had been brought up in one of the oldest traditions of the British Isles, as a member of a traditional Family with a wealth of knowledge which has never been written down, and she took Anne on to “train”.

Anne has worked with Mary Mc Laughlin in the 1980s as the duo Anonyma, and they toured the UK as well as twice in the US. She’s also worked with Steafan Hannigan on all of her eight CDs, and toured in the US with him and as a solo performer in folk events and coffeehouses, as well as festivals. She also runs workshops on voice, creativity, storytelling, songwriting and performance technique.

In 2015 she had the chance to follow her bliss and research a PhD on the Tale of Jaufre, a little-known 13^th century Arthurian story written in Occitan, taking it out to audiences to tell in English, probably for the first time. She has now written two books, one telling the story in English and the other describing her research, which took her down some fascinating rabbit holes. She’s currently working on a series of fantasy novels, blending British folklore with medieval history in a contemporary setting.