Anna Emm

AN author has published a book designed to help people cope with depression.

Anna Emm, a writer from South Africa, has written more than 1,000 children’s books and more than 50 fiction stories for adults.

She left her homeland behind to start a new life in Angel, where she has just published a new double novel, Saving Harvey Bell / Polar Bear.

The idea of connecting with people through reading came from her experience of teaching in a primary school back in her homeland in 1998, when schools were underfunded and broadly unregulated.

“I was 21 years old and they just threw me into the classroom and shut the door,” she said, describing how many of the children in her class had been victims of abuse or violence.

“It was in a severely disadvantaged environment. I was very young and actually in way over my head so I just defaulted back to what worked for me, which was stories. And I started to read to these children and I could see first of all, the story relaxed them.

Ms Emm during her time as a teacher in South Africa

“But I was very curious when I started to see all the other benefits: like their concentration got better. They started to show empathy towards each other. They were able to express themselves to talk about what was going on. They could express themselves creatively. They started to write their own stories. They started to do beautiful drawings and things like that.”

At the end of her first year of teaching, despite doing one hour’s worth of reading a day while other classes were studying, her class outperformed all the other classes.

From there, she began to write stories for her class, casting the kids as the heroes in the tales.

She discovered that writing could have almost a “hypnotic” effect on the children, like music, allowing them to switch off from the real world and enter an imaginary one that allowed their minds to “reboot”.

After four years of teaching she left to start publishing her books as CD audiobooks. After 15 years she had six members of staff and 500 sales reps selling 2,000 CDs a month, but folded the company in 2020 and came to London two years later.

With some young fans

Ms Emm moved to Angel after falling in love with the area while on a holiday, when her husband was offered a job as a computer program­mer in this country.

She said of the holiday: “I Googled ‘where can you find a good breakfast?’ We got on a bus with the maps and everything and it led us to Angel, and then we thought, ‘Oh, this is a lovely area’. We really liked it. And so when we moved here we really wanted to be close to Angel.”

While she has since left teaching, the desire to use reading as a force for good has stayed with her.

For her most recently published book, she asked people with mental health issues to get in touch and gave away the first 500 copies for free.

“A lot of the people said reading the book had given them a drastic reduction in anxiety levels,” she said. “They slept better. A lot of people said they were energised, they had more energy to tackle the problems. They felt hopeful.”