Anna Couani

Anna Couani (born 6 April 1948) is a contemporary Australian writer and visual artist.

Anna Couani
Anna Couani in 1976
Born	(1948-04-06) 6 April 1948
Nationality	Australian
Website
www.annacouani.com

Anna Couani was born and grew up in Sydney the eldest of four children of medical doctors John Couani and Stefania Siedlecky.[1] Her families have Greek and Polish heritage. She studied architecture at the University of Sydney, then took a Diploma of Education (Art) at Sydney Teachers' College and later, an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language from the University of Technology Sydney. Since the 1970s she has participated in feminist activism, small press publishing. She was an officer of the Sydney branch of The Poets Union in the 1980's. She was a secondary school teacher from 1972 - 2016, teaching art and ESL. In her educational work Couani published NSW Department of Education and Training booklets of worksheets for ESL learners, for example, Writing in the Visual Arts.[2] She was union representative for The NSW Teachers Federation in several Intensive English Centres where she worked in the western suburbs of Sydney.

Couani became interested in experimental writing in the 1970s, which led to her meeting  artists and writers including Robert Kenny, Ken Bolton, Rae Jones and Kris Hemensley. Her first collection of poems, Italy, was published in 1977. She was an editor with Ken Bolton for a journal of experimental writing, Magic Sam. She established Sea Cruise Books which published books by herself, Pamela Brown, Denis Gallagher, Ken Bolton, Robert Kenny, Kerry Leves, Barbara Brooks, Moya Costello, Carmel Kelly, Kris Hemensley and Joanne Burns in the 1980's.[1]A concern with marginalised aspects of women's lives runs throughout her writing.

In 1978 Couani was a founding member of the Sydney Women Writers Workshop, also known as the No Regrets group. In the 1980s Couani published experimental writing, including Were all Women Sex Mad? (1982), The Train (1983), The Harbour Breathes (1989). Her novel The Western Horizon was serialised in HEAT magazine from 1996 to 2000 and is now available online.[3] In the 2000's, she published books of poetry - Small Wonders (2011) and thinking process (2017). Her work has appeared in many anthologies of prose and poetry.

Since 2014, she has run The Shop Gallery in Glebe with her husband, sculptor Hilik Mirankar.