Anna Reynolds is a British novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. She is the author of Tightrope (1991) and Jordan, which was voted "Best Play of 1992" at the Writers Guild Awards, and co-author of The Winding Sheet, a film that won a Silver Hugo

Hugo Award

The Hugo Awards are given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was officially named the Science Fiction Achievement Awards...

 at the Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

 Film Festival. Her first novel, Insanity, was published in 1996.

Publications

Reynolds has had 10 plays professionally produced, including Jordan, Red (Clean Break Theatre Company), Precious (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Wild Things (Salisbury Playhouse), Look At Me (Theatre Centre/Mercury Theatre), Deep Joy (Mercury Theatre), Skin Hunger (Time Out Critics Choice, BAC), Ring Road Tales (Watford Palace Theatre), and Sweetie Pie (Menagerie Theatre Company, Cambridge Arts Centre and Latchmere Theatre London). Her screenplay Paradise was broadcast by the BBC and The Winding Sheet by Channel 4 Television in the UK.

She written for The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

, The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

, New Statesman

New Statesman

New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....

, The Observer

The Observer

The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...

, and The Big Issue

The Big Issue

The Big Issue is a street newspaper published in eight countries; it is written by professional journalists and sold by homeless individuals. It was founded by John Bird and Gordon Roddick in September 1991...

.

She is one of the founders of the British writers' group writewords.org.uk.

Personal life

In 1986, at the age of 17, Anna Reynolds murdered her sleeping mother with a hammer. She was sentenced to life in prison, and sent to Durham Prison, but her conviction was overturned after two years when Reynold's won an appeal after it was discovered she was suffering from a hormone imbalance, premenstrual stress syndrome

Premenstrual stress syndrome

Premenstrual syndrome is a collection of physical and emotional symptoms related to a woman's menstrual cycle...

, based on evidence provided by Dr Katharina Dalton

Katharina Dalton

Katharina Dalton was a British physician and pioneer in the research of premenstrual stress syndrome...

. Reynolds was then sent to a mental health institute in Northampton to seek additional help.