Anna Brækkan (Lastochkina) is a literary scholar, Kandidat nauk (PhD) in Foreign Literature from Saint Petersburg State University. She has extensive experience teaching English, having taught courses such as General English, Academic Writing in English, Writing and Thinking in English, and Debate in English at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny College) from 2012 to 2018. Her research interests include British and Norwegian literature as well as narratology.

Anna has completed multiple seminars at The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) and founded the Smolny Debate Society, which she led for five years. She also organized the international student debate tournament Smolny Open multiple times.

Since moving to Norway in 2019, she has pursued further education in Norwegian language and literature at the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). Since 2022, she has been teaching Norwegian to adult learners.