MARION HALLIGAN was born in Newcastle on the east coast of Australia and grew up by the sea. She was educated at Newcastle Girls' High School and Newcastle University. Her home is now Canberra.

She has published fifteen books, plus one jointly authored. Novels are Self Possession (1987), Spider Cup (Penguin 1990, Minerva 1996), Wishbone (Heinemann 1994, Minerva 1995, 1996), which was one of the New Zealand Listener Women's Book Festival Top Twenty Titles for 1995, Lovers' Knots (Heinemann 1992), which won The Age Book of the Year Award (1992) the ACT Book of the Year Award for 1993 (shared with the poet AD Hope), the 3M Talking Book of the Year Award and the inaugural Nita B. Kibble Award and The Golden Dress first published by Penguin in April 1998. It was shortlisted in Australia for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, the Miles Franklin Award, and the Nita B Kibble. Collections of short stories are The Living Hothouse (UQP 1988) which won the Steele Rudd Award and the Braille Book of the Year, The Hanged Man in the Garden (Penguin 1991) shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Prize, The Worry Box (Minerva 1993) and Collected Short Stories (UQP 1997), as well as a book of stories and essays, Out of the Picture (National Library 1996). Eat My Words (Imprint 1990), winner of the Gastronomy Prize, and Cockles of the Heart (Minerva 1996) are autobiographical narratives of travel and food. Those Women Who Go To Hotels (Minerva 1997) is a collaboration with Lucy Frost. A children's book called The Midwife's Daughters was published in August 1997. Her work has been short-listed for most of the major literary prizes in Australia.

Her last novel was The Fog Garden (Allen & Unwin 2001), a novel, shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Literary Award, the Nita B Kibble, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Vision Australia Talking Book Award and the ASAL Gold medal. Her newest novel is The Point.

She wrote the five scripts for Gastronomica (theatre pieces in leading restaurants) in the 1994 Melbourne Festival, as well as for a children's music theatre piece, Kilcallow Catch, in association with Stephen Leak and Judith Clingan, performed in 1992.

She has published more than seventy short stories in journals and magazines, and has been widely anthologised. In 1998 she and Rosanne Fitzgibbon edited an anthology, The Gift of Story, to celebrate the 50th birthday of UQP. In 2001 she edited Storykeepers, a collection of writing on writers, a Century of Federation project in conjunction with the National Museum of Australia, published by Duffy and Snellgrove. She has reviewed books for the Canberra Times, The Age, The Australian, Australian Book Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, Good Reading, Twentyfour Hours, ABC Radio, and also writes essays and newspaper articles. She won the inaugural Geraldine Pascall Prize for critical writing in 1990. She has received a number of fellowships from the Literature Board of the Australia Council, the most recent a two-year fellowship beginning in 1998. In 1994 she won the Newton John Award, given to a graduate of Newcastle University for creative and innovative work.

Lovers' Knots was published in England in 1995, and Wishbone in 1996, under the Mandarin imprint, and Wishbone was sold into Canada. Her stories have been published in magazines overseas, and she has read her work in London, Germany, Belgium, Paris, New Zealand, Canada and Norway. She has been a guest at most of the Australian literary festivals and at Hamburg, Vancouver, and Harbourfront in Toronto, as well as New Zealand's Listener Women's Book Festival and Aoteora World Book Day. In August 2000 she was a guest at the South American Second International Women's Writer's Festival in Rosario. She has also been writer in residence in Wagga Wagga and briefly in Monash and Latrobe. In 1991 she spent six months in the Literature Board's Keesing Studio in Paris. In 1997 she was a guest at the European Association of Studies on Australia Conference in Klagenfurt in Austria. She has spent a month at Adelaide University as writer-in-residence, and another month as Distinguished Visiting Scholar.

Two of her novels are being translated into German. Working Title has taken out an option on a film of Wishbone.

From 1992-1995 she was Chairperson of the Literature Board and a member of the Australia Council. For some years she was chair of the Canberra Word Festival committee and is now patron. She has been chair of the ACT Writers' Centre.

In 2002 she was visiting curator at the Newcastle Regional Museum, preparing a permanent exhibition which opened in February 2003.