Anthony Howell

Who is Anthony Howell?

Anthony Howell is an English poet, novelist and performance artist. He was a founder of the performance company The Theatre of Mistakes, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Howell was born in 1945. By 1966 he was dancing with the Royal Ballet, but left the ballet in order to concentrate on writing, and his first collection of poems, Inside the Castle, was published by the Cresset Press in 1969. At that time, he was teaching creative writing to students at the American Institute for Foreign Study at their University of Grenoble campus.

In 1970 he directed The Oz Event at the ICA and read his poems at the Poetry Society. His choric song, Essora Tessorio, was performed at The Whitechapel Gallery in 1973, and, in the same year, he was invited to join the International Writers' program at the University of Iowa.

He founded performance company The Theatre of Mistakes in 1974. Under his direction, this company made notable appearances at The Cambridge Poetry Festival, at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, at the Hayward Gallery, at the Biennale de Paris, in the Musée d'Art Modern and at FIAC in the Grand Palais.