Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon (born 1962 ^[1]) is a contemporary Australian poet, playwright, fantasy novelist, and librettist.

Life

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. 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: A Synthetic Life and The Burrow, which premiered respectively at the 2000 Melbourne Festival and Perth Festival, produced by ChamberMade.^[3] In 2014, Iain Grandage's opera The Riders, to Croggon's libretto based on Tim Winton's novel The Riders, had its world premiere in Melbourne.

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.

Awards and nominations

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

Works

Poetry

• This is the Stone. Penguin Books Australia. 1991. ISBN 0-14-058666-0. 
• The Blue Gate. Black Pepper Press. 1997. ISBN 1-876044-18-7. 
• Mnemosyne. Wild Honey Press. 2001. ISBN 1-903090-31-8. 
• Attempts at Being. Salt Publishing. 2002. ISBN 1-876857-42-0.  excerpt
• The Common Flesh: Poems 1980-2002. Arc. 2003. ISBN 1-900072-72-6. 
• November Burning. Vagabond. 2004. 
• Ash. Cusp Books. 
• Theatre. Salt Publishing. 

Novella

• Navigatio. Black Pepper. 1996. ISBN 1-876044-09-8. 

Fantasy novels

The Books of Pellinor

• The Gift. Penguin. 2003. ISBN 0-14-029343-4.  (Published in the US as The Naming (Candlewick Press, ISBN 0-7636-2639-2)
• The Riddle. Penguin. 2004. ISBN 1-84428-952-4. 
• The Crow. Penguin. 2006. ISBN 1-4063-0137-X. 
• The Singing. Penguin. 2008. ISBN 978-0-670-07238-5. 

Standalone

• Black Spring. Walter Books. 2012. ISBN 978-1921977480. 

Libretti

• (1995) The Burrow, ISBN 0-949697-25-7
• (2000) Gauguin (a synthetic life)
• (2014) The Riders

References

External links

• Alison Croggon's Home Page
• Masthead Literary Arts Zine
• Theatre Notes Weblog
• Official Author Forum
• Recordings of poems at Poetry Archive
• Interview
• Alison Croggon at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Books of Pellinor