Anna Meryt

I’m Anna Meryt and I’ve been writing all my life. I live in North London, in a small flat with French glass doors which open onto my small shady garden. It’s a peaceful green haven in a busy part of London. I love London for its multinational character- I hear half a dozen languages on the bus sometimes.

It took me many years to write A Hippopotamus at the Table. It’s a memoir set in South Africa from 1975-78. In case you’re not clear about what a memoir is, it’s not an autobiography – that would be my whole life story. A memoir is a story about part of your life. It’s not a biography either – that’s when you write someone else’s life story. It’s certainly a true story though. Amazon lists memoirs under ‘Biography and True Accounts’ and because it’s set in South Africa it’s also listed under Ethnic and National/Africa and History/Africa.

Do read my story, I wrote it for many reasons but one was for a small piece of South African history (if that doesn’t sound too grandiose) as it was about a time we lived through, which has changed completely (thank goodness), and didn’t result in a bloodbath, thanks to that tower of strength Madiba - Nelson Mandela. Mandela was mostly unknown to us at the time we lived in Cape Town – and yet he was living out his life sentence on Robben Island – a small speck in the distance, in clear view of anyone who stood on Sea Point or Clifton beaches in those days and stared out across the Atlantic to the West.

Now I’m writing my second memoir, Beyond the Bounds and that is a complete change of scene – its settings are both London and the island of Java in Indonesia. You see in 2003 I found myself on a plane to Java with ten thousand pounds hidden at the bottom of my suitcase, the money I had raised to get my ex-husband (yes the same Dave) out of a cockroach and rat infested cell with no bedding, just a concrete floor to sleep on. If you want to know more it’ll be finished next year, hopefully, and won’t take the 20 years to write like my first book did, now that I’m a full-time writer with grown up children. Oh and BTW I sent off the first chapter to the Winchester Writers Festival Memoir Competition and got a ‘Highly Commended’. Let’s hope the rest of it lives up to that! It's coming out in early 2021.

I learnt much by writing my memoir, and then consolidating my craft as a writer in writing groups and in doing an MA in Professional Writing. I taught Egyptian history in various colleges throughout the 90s (my first degree was in Ancient and Near Eastern history at UCL) and then stopped teaching for many years and delivered Cognitive Behavioural trainings in Criminal Justice. Recently I have come back to teaching – I teach small groups about writing memoir - many people have a story to tell. Fantastic stories emerge from my course, I love hearing all of them. So I decided to put a book together, based on teaching these groups. It’s called (unsurprisingly) -

Writing Memoir. How to Write a Story from Your Life. It was published in 2018 and is selling quite well on Amazon.

Do visit my blog/website – www.ameryt.com – where you’ll also find articles I’ve written for writers and readers, tales of my travels in Africa and India – places where I’ve hopped around as a solo traveller in backpack hostels, places where I’ve seen whales and dolphins, where I’ve been an object of curiosity as the only white person, where people have most times been kind to me. The latest visit was in January - it was just before lockdown 2020 - where I visited Thula Thula founded by the author of The Elephant Whisperer.

There are also short stories and poetry – as I’m a poet too. Find out more by clicking the Poetry tab at the top of the website home page.

I have a mailing list on my website. If you want to make contact so I can add you to the list, email anna.meryt@ameryt.com