Anne Aylor is a professional writer and teacher. She has had short stories and poems published by the Arts Council of Great Britain, The Literary Review, London Magazine, Fiction Magazine, Stand Magazine and broadcast on BBC Radios 3 and 4. In 2008 her short story, "The Speed of Dark", was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the biggest open creative writing competition in the English language.
No Angel Hotel, her first novel, was published in the UK by HarperCollins and Grafton Book and by St Martin’s Press, New York (US title: Angel Hotel). For an archive review of Angel Hotel in the Pittsburgh Press, click here. She has recently completed her second novel, The Double Happiness Company, and is working on her third (working title: The Speed of Dark).
She has won or been a runner-up in a number of competitions, including the BBC Radio 3 Short Story Competition, Stand Magazine Short Story Competition, the Dixon Ward Short Story Competition and the 2005 Good Houskeeping Short Story Competiion, judges: Alexander McCall Smith, Julie Meyerson, Lindsay Nicholson, Ali Gunn (Curtin Brown) and Kate Elton (Editor-in-Chief, Random House). In 2008 her short story, "The Speed of Dark", was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.
Her stage play, Children of the Dust, won the 1987 International Playwriting Festival competition and was co-produced by the Soho Theatre and the Theatre Warehouse, Croydon. Her short play, The M & M Café was commissioned and published by the Oxford University Press. Her stage play, Happiness Is North of Here, had a rehearsed reading at the Gate Theatre, London.
The Trainer, a new play by David Wilson and Anne Aylor, had a rehearsed reading at Oxford House in March 2009 with Tim Pigott-Smith. It was later performed in Two Plays for Gaza at the Hackney Empire, London, in May 2009 along with Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children. This bridge-building evening for peace in the Middle East was a benefit in aid of the Gaza Music School and starred Corin Redgrave, Roger Lloyd Pack, Jana Zeineddine and Paul Herzberg. For Guy Smallman's slideshow of The Trainer, click here.
Anne was a shortlist judge in the 2007 Wimbledon Book Fest (Sandi Toksvig Writing Challenge) and has given teleseminars and weekend courses at Alternatives, St James Church, Piccadilly. in 2010 she was asked to lead a writing masterclass at the Redbridge Book and Media Festival. She taught playwriting at the City Lit, London, and has taught at Morley College for over twenty years. She loves to write because it doesn’t involve high maths or high heels.
REVIEWS OF NO ANGEL HOTEL
‘Anne Aylor’s Angel Hotel was published in Great Britain as No Angel Hotel. Make of that what you will, but the first novel is a finely crafted and very moving exploration of the youthful pain and the lasting passion of love.
Writing in prose that is sometimes breathless, sometimes poised and straining for rationality, Aylor tells the tale of young Elkie, a working-class girl from Northern Ireland, and her affair with a sophisticated intellectual, Ivan, “like Count Vronsky with dark hair”. At the beginning, Ivan’s interest is casual and self-indulgent, but Elkie, misunderstanding and faithful, in love, wants to go off with him. In a moment of frustration, Ivan agrees. What follows is a series of drab rented rooms, brief visits, a fading hope of marriage, a dozen years of nothing but occasional postcards, and then, in the midst of new maturity, a final, fateful postcard. Aylor’s sensitive writing, in all it moods, makes this otherwise ordinary love story into a quiet reflection on the fragility of human feelings, a reflection that almost inevitably, she suggests, leaves us with a lump in the throat.’
Washington Post Book World
‘The multi-talented Anne Aylor (she is also a professional dancer) has produced a first novel, No Angel Hotel, of spellbinding intensity. It records the obsessive love of a beautiful but naive Irish village girl for the worldly heir to the surrounding estate. He takes her to London. In a squalid boarding-house her days narrow to encompass only his less and less frequent visits. Finally he leaves, though for 13 years postcards arrive for her waiting still at the same address. Written in brief, ephemeral passages as if a more prolonged focus would scorch the page, this is an exhilarating first novel.’
Yorkshire Post
BBC Radio 3 broadcast a short story taken from Anne's second novel, The Double Happiness Company. Click below to listen . . .
"Where Old Men May Spend the Heat of the Day" (short story)
"A Red Herring" (short story)
"Roman Candles" (short story)
"The Hat" (short story)
