Born in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis in 1967, Anna Frater was brought up in the village of Upper Bayble in the Point district of the island. Scottish Gaelic is her first language, and the language in which her poetry is written. Her poems were first published in Gairm magazine (1986) while she was a student at Glasgow University, from which she graduated with an honours degree in Celtic and French in 1990. After a year at Jordanhill College training as a secondary teacher, she returned to Glasgow University and was awarded a PhD in 1995 for her thesis on Scottish Gaelic Women’s Poetry up to 1750. Her work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, and in her own collection, Fon t-Slige (Under the Shell) published by Gairm in 1995.