Annie Holmes is a writer and filmmaker. She was born in Zambia and raised in Zimbabwe. Holmes studied literature in South Africa and then worked as a teacher and book editor.
Annie Holmes earned a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand and a BA with distinction in English from the University of Cape Town.
Holmes was also a documentary producer in Zimbabwe and a television producer in South Africa before enrolling in a fiction writing program in California in 2001.
She holds an MFA (Creative Writing) from San Francisco State University.
Annie Holmes debuted with Good Red (2007), a personal memoir of history’s mad gallop through three decades of Independence in this complicated Southern African nation.
In 2010, she published Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. Alexandra Fuller from Harper’s Magazine said: "Hope Deferred might be the most important publication to have come out of Zimbabwe in the past thirty years."
Another notable work, breach (2016), is a short fiction co-authored with Olumide Popoola, inspired by experiences and interviews in the refugee camp in Calais.
After living in the US and UK, Annie Holmes now resides in Portugal.
Photo credit: annieholmes.net