Anna Livia (author)
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Personal life and education
Anna Livia was born on 13 November 1955, in Dublin, Ireland. She was born to Patrick St. John, a writer and film maker, and Dympna Brawn, a poet, and had two brothers and a sister. She was named after Julian of Norwich and Anna Livia Plurabelle, the character from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake.
The family moved to Luanshya, Zambia in 1960, and then to Swaziland where she attended the Waterford Kamhlaba boarding school in Mbabane. In 1970, they moved to the United Kingdom. Livia attended the Rosa Bassett School in South London for her primary and secondary education.
Livia graduated from the University College London in 1979 with a Bachelors of Arts in French with a minor in Italian. She also received a post-graduate certificate in education from UCL in 1981.
In 1999, she had twins with her partner Jeannie Witkin; they eventually split up but continued to co-parent their children. At the time of her death, Livia's partner was Patti Roberts.
Livia died suddenly of natural causes on 7 August 2007.
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Career and writing
In the 1980s, she taught French and English at the University of Avignon. She was a co-director of the Feminist Press in London from 1982–1989. From 1983–1990, she was an editor for Onlywomen Press as well as their periodical, Gossip, from 1984–1988. From 1994–2002, she edited for the Lesbian Review of Books.
In 1995, she received her doctorate in French linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. She taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1995 to 1998. She began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1999, which she continued to do until her death. She published her revised PhD thesis, Pronoun Envy (2000), in which she "developed a feminist analysis of the use of pronouns," in English and French writing. From 2001–2002, she taught as a visiting lecturer at Mills College.
Relatively Norma (1982)
Livia's first novel is about Minnie, a lesbian from London, who travels to Australia to visit with and come out to her family. They barely react to her pronouncement of lesbianism, seemingly too busy with their own lives and identities. In her book Contemporary Lesbian Writing: Dreams, Desire, Difference, Paulina Palmer argues that Livia's novel "questions the significance of lesbianism as the key to personal identity," and "humorously exposes the excuses heterosexuals employ to avoid confronting and discussing the subject of lesbianism." Sally Munt, in her exploration of lesbian novels between 1979 and 1989, generally views the novel positively, but states that it is filled with "counter-cultural specificities of early 1980s London feminism," that border on the "self-referential claustrophobia which can sentence a text to obscurity outside its own sycophantic subculture."
All of the male characters names are John, as a reference to clients of prostitutes. In an interview for The Leveller, Livia explains that "As a lesbian-feminist, I write in a lesbian-feminist context...The male characters are all called John...that's saying I think all men are Johns, which is true.... If other women want to read it, they'll have to imagine themselves into the lesbian feminist framework."
Awards
Three of Livia's books were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards for Lesbian Fiction. Incidents Involving Mirth was nominated in 1990, Minimax in 1991, and Bruised Fruit in 1999. She won a Vermont Booksellers Association Special Merit Award for translation.