Marion Halligan is an award-winning novelist, essayist and short-story writer. She has been shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and the Nita B. Kibble Award. She worked as a school teacher and freelance journalist before becoming a prolific writer in her forties. She moved to Canberra in the 1960s and her first published short story appeared in the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1969.

Halligan has published numerous short stories, including those in her Collected Stories (1997), in Best Australian Stories 2003, and those in Out of the Picture (1995), commissioned by the National Library of Australia and structured around works in the library’s Pictorial Collection. Her food and travel writing includes Eat My Words (1990), Cockles of the Heart (1996) and Taste of Memory (2004). She co-authored Those Women Who Go to Hotels with Lucy Frost in 1997.

Her work is inspired by personal experiences and the places in which she has lived. Her novel The Fog Garden draws on the experience of losing her husband to cancer.

In June 2006, Halligan was awarded with an AM – General Division, ‘for service to literature as an author, to the promotion of Australian writers and to support for literary events and professional organisations.’