A specialist in Caribbean art and literature, Anne Walmsley is a British editor, scholar, critic and author. Anne started her career in the late 1950s when she worked as a secretary for Faber and Faber. Following this, she spent three years as a teacher at Westwood High School in Jamaica. When she returned to the UK, she worked for a time with BBC Schools television service.
Her career with Longman began in 1967, where she was employed as their first editor on Caribbean focused writing. In 1968, The Sun's Eye was published which marked her first compilation of Caribbean literature. Anne Walmsley spent ten years in this role, before moving to Nairobi as publishing editor for Longman Kenya. She later returned to the U.K. to undertake a Master's in African Studies at the University of Sussex.
Anne Walmsley participated in the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), founded in 1966 by Kamau Braithwaite, John La Rose and Andrew Salkey. In 1985 she was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to research CAM and in 1992 she was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Kent for her thesis on this, which was also published as a book entitled The Caribbean Artists Movement: A Literary and Cultural History, 1966-1971.
Anne Walmsley has contributed to a range of journals, literary magazines, exhibition catalogues and anthologies. The archive at Newcastle University Special Collections holds a range of material including letters and reports from her time at Longman's, her scrapbook from teaching at Westwood, research on CAM, and research on a range of Caribbean artists.