Alison Croggon | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Croggon at Perth Festival Writers Week in 2019 | |
| Born | 1962 (age 62) Transvaal, South Africa |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Genre | Fantasy, fiction, poetry, libretti |
Alison Croggon (born 1962) is a contemporary Australian poet, playwright, fantasy novelist, and librettist.[1]
Born in the Transvaal, South Africa, Alison Croggon's family moved to England before settling in Australia, first in Ballarat then Melbourne.[2] She has worked as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. Her first volume of poetry, This is the Stone, won the Anne Elder Award and the Mary Gilmore Prize.[3] Her novella Navigatio was highly commended in the 1995 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award.[4] Four novels of the fantasy genre series Pellinor have been published. She also founded and edits the online writing magazine Masthead[5] and writes theatre criticism.[6]
Croggon has also written libretti for Michael Smetanin's operas Gauguin: A Synthetic Life and The Burrow, which premiered respectively at the 2000 Melbourne Festival and Perth Festival, produced by ChamberMade.[7][8] In 2014, Iain Grandage (composer) and Croggon (librettist) collaborated to present The Riders, based on Tim Winton's novel The Riders. Its world premiere was in Melbourne.[9]
Other poems by Croggon have been set to music by Smetanin, Christine McCombe, Margaret Legge-Wilkinson, and Andrée Greenwell.[10] Her plays have been produced by the Melbourne Festival, The Red Shed Company (Adelaide) and ABC Radio.
As of 2023, she is arts editor at The Saturday Paper.[11]
She currently lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband Daniel Keene and three children.[12]
