Alison Croggon
Alison Croggon is an award-winning novelist, poet, librettist and critic. She has 30 years experience reviewing performance for outlets such as the Australian, the ABC and The Monthly and generated an international reputation as a performance critic with her influential blog Theatre Notes, which revolutionised performance discourse in Australia. In 2009 she was the first online critic to win the prestigious Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year Award. With Robert Reid, she is is co-editor and founder of the performing arts site Witness Performance.
Alison has published eight collections of poetry and several novels, including the acclaimed fantasy quintet The Books of Pellinor, Black Spring and The River and the Book. She won the Dame Mary Gilmore and Anne Elder Awards for poetry and the Wilderness Society’s 2016 Environment Award for Children’s Literature for The River and the Book. As well, her poetry collections and novels have been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the WA Premier’s Literary Award, and her most recent fantasy novel The Bone Queen was shortlisted for YA Book of the Year in the 2017 Aurealis Awards. She has written libretti for eight operas, including The Riders with Iain Grandage, for which they won Vocal/Choral Work of the Year in the Art Music Awards in 2015, and Mayakovsky with Michael Smetanin, for which her libretto was shortlisted for the Drama Prize in the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. You can find out more at alisoncroggon.com.