In the 1980s, my friend Anne Harvey, who has died aged 89, felt inspired to produce an anthology to follow A Puffin Quartet of Poets, which had been published nearly 30 years earlier. She was then teaching drama at Notting Hill and Ealing High school, in London, and although she had not edited an anthology professionally before, she approached Puffin Books with the idea.
Much to her surprise Anne was commissioned to produce Poets in Hand: A Puffin Quintet, which was published in 1985 and marked the start of her successful career as an editor of anthologies. She produced more than 35 anthologies for various publishers in the following years, and won the prestigious Signal award for Shades of Green, a collection of nature poems, in 1992. She also gave literary presentations that were enjoyed by diverse, rapt audiences of school pupils and adults alike in locations from Chichester to Cheltenham.
