Anna Leader

Anna Justine Leader (born 1996) is a Luxembourg poet and novelist who writes in English. She has won several awards including Luxembourg's national literary contest for young authors (Concours littéraire national, jeunes auteurs de 15-25 ans), first for her novel A Several World in 2014, then for her poetry collection A Lifetime Lies in 2015, and finally for her play Outlast in 2018. Born in Bellingham, Washington, on 19 October 1996, Anna Justine Leader is the daughter of American schoolteacher René Leader and the British writer and schoolteacher James Leader. After spending her first four years in the United States, she moved with her family to Luxembourg in 2000. She matriculated from the International School of Luxembourg in 2014, after which she embarked on a comparative literature course at Princeton University. Leader graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in June 2018. Anna has won the Luxembourgish Concours littéraire national three times, in 2014, 2015, and 2018. Aged 16, she completed her first novel; Tentative tells the story of a teenage triad in Paris. In 2014, her first historical novel won the Luxembourg literary contest in the under-25 category. A Several World is based on a period when Trotsky, Freud, Klimt and the young Anna Freud were all living close to each other in Vienna at the time of World War I. Leader completed the manuscript of 140,000 words in just three months while taking her international baccalaureate examinations. In 2015, Anna won first place again for a collection of poems titled "A Lifetime Lies," and in 2018 the prize was awarded to her play Outlast, a queer environmental take on Luxembourg's founding myth. When interviewed by Amanda Blanco at Princeton in March 2016, she explained that she has been strongly influenced by her literary father, publishing her first poem when she was only five. She hopes to have a career in education, following in the footsteps of her parents and grandparents. Leader graduated from Princeton University in June 2018 and now works in education.