Annemarie Austin was born in Devon and grew up on the Somerset Levels and in Weston-super-Mare, where has lived for most of her life. She won the Cheltenham Literature Festival Poetry Competition in 1980, and her first collection, The Weather Coming (1987), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Very: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) includes work from all her collections, including On the Border (1993), The Flaying of Marsyas (1995), Door upon Door (1999) and Back from the Moon (2003). She has since written two further collections, Track (2014), and Shall We Go? (to appear in 2021).