Alison Croggon was born in the Transvaal, South Africa in 1962. She worked as a journalist for the Melbourne Herald until 1985. Her first book of poems, This Is the Stone, was published in 1991 and won the Anne Elder Award and the Dame Mary Gilmore Prize. Her other books of poetry include The Blue Gate, Attempts at Being, The Common Flesh: New and Selected Poems, and Theatre. She also writes the children's fantasy series Pellinor. Her children's novel, The River and the Book, won the 2016 Wilderness Society Environment Award for Children¿s Literature, Fiction. She is Melbourne theatre critic for The Australian and keeps a blog of theatre criticism called Theatre Notes. In 2009, she was named Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year. She has also written and had preformed nine theatrical works including the operas Gauguin and The Burrow, and the plays Lenz, Samarkand and The Famine, and Blue.
