On Language as a Home and what Poetry has to do with Economics.
There are people who live in the space between things, and people who draw their inspiration from that space. Anna Seidel belongs to the latter category. The German–Dutch was raised in Switzerland, then New York, London and Oxford, hers is a life that reads like a chain of moving boxes, were it not for the one object that always travelled with her: a small notebook, “Panama” by Smythson, in which everything is written down. In it resides herself. As a child, she constantly had to interpret new environments, switch languages and adapt her roles. This compulsion to keep translating, she argues, is not an obstacle to writing but a prerequisite. “Your world only really comes into being through this crossing of boundaries.” For her, writing poetry has always been something architectural, more engineering than self-expression.
The 29-year old is now based between London and Zurich, works across investment management and literary curation, runs poetry workshops for corporate and cultural institutions and writes poetry herself. In between: collaborations with luxury fashion brands, an appearance at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, the Eisenhower Fellowship as its youngest recipient since 1953, and a nomination for the prestigious McCloy Fellow 2025. Then there is this collection of poems: Desiderium, published in 2022, named after the Latin word describing a longing born of loss. What makes someone a polymath? Not the accumulation of degrees – economics and philosophy at the University of St. Gal- len and Harvard, followed by a master’s in literature at Oxford – but the ability to gain genuine insight at the intersections between disciplines. Seidel realised early on that economics and poetry operate on the same terrain. Economics, she says, helps one to read intentions. People become more transparent once you understand how they assign value. Literature, on the other hand, guards against the opposite: thinking in stereotypes, losing nuance, underestimating risks because the brain automatically smooths over whatever does not fit one’s own belief system.
At Blackstone, where she worked as an investment analyst, she wrote an internal essay titled How Poetry Can Make You A Better Investor. She laughs when she talks about it. It was bizarre, of course: the only woman with a drawer full of poetry beside her Bloomberg Terminal. Her senior at Blackstone, the Head of Europe, had studied Romance Languages and Literatures, not finance. Their conversation about it lasted a long time. “That’s what defines leaders.” This way of thinking – concrete, connective, without academic self-consciousness is perhaps the most characteristic thing about Seidel. Writing in the literal sense: always by hand, always with the fountain pen her father left her, always in small notebooks. Her father is an artist, she says, and owned an entire collection of fountain pens. It is one of those details that, for a moment, explains more than any biography could: the craft of writing as an inherited gesture, as the physical memory of another person. The Napkin Poetry Review, which Seidel founded with Caroline King whilst studying for her master’s degree at Oxford, is the institutional distillation of these convictions: poems taken out of the mausoleum and brought to the dinner table. Poetry dinners around the world, with guests from finance, tech, science and art. The aim, she explains, is to dismantle the belief ingrained in people since school: that poetry is abstract, authoritarian, not meant for them. The defining moment is always the same, regardless of the city. A finance director arrives in a suit, enclosed within his role, and then at some point opens up. The intimacy that suddenly becomes possible – that is the evening. “Poems can be like medicine for the soul.” Not a marketing promise. An observation. There are drafts in her notebook, she says, that no one has seen yet. Texts in which characters are like captured or restrained feelings, and she has not yet let them go. and she has not yet let them go. “Sometimes they’re still too raw. But one day they’ll become something truly beautiful.” It is perhaps the most revealing sentence by a person who adopts precise roles in almost every public context and knows exactly that she is doing so. In writing, Seidel says, one is most honestly oneself. Not in success. Not in networking. In the notebook.
As featured in SLEEK #89 – PLAY