Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon (born 1962) is a contemporary Australian poet, playwright, fantasy novelist, and librettist.

Life
Croggon was born in the Transvaal, South Africa. Her family moved to England before settling in Australia, first in Ballarat then Melbourne. 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. Her novella Navigatio was recommended in the 1995 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and all four novels of the fantasy genre series Pellinor have been published. She also edits the online writing magazine Masthead and writes theatre criticism.

Croggon has also written libretti for Michael Smetanin's operas Gauguin and The Burrow which premiered respectively at the 2000 Melbourne Festival and Perth Festival, produced by ChamberMade. Other poems by her have been set to music by Smetanin, Christine McCombe, Margaret Legge-Wilkinson and Andrée Greenwell. Her plays have been produced by the Melbourne Festival, The Red Shed Company (Adelaide) and ABC Radio.

She currently lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband and three children.

Recognition

 * 2009 Pascall Prize for Critical Writing for her blog Theatre Notes

Poetry

 * excerpt
 * excerpt
 * excerpt
 * excerpt

Fantasy

 * (Published in the US as The Naming (Candlewick Press, ISBN 0-7636-2639-2)

Libretti

 * (1995) The Burrow, ISBN 0-949697-25-7
 * (2000) Gauguin (a synthetic life)