The Australian Women's Register

Marion Halligan was born and educated in Newcastle, New South Wales, and 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. She married Graham Halligan and they had two children, Lucy and James.

Her fiction books include: Self Possession (1987), The Living Hothouse (1988), The Hanged Man in the Garden (1989), Spider Cup (1990), Lovers’ Knots: A Hundred-Year Novel (1992), The Worry Box (1993), Wishbone (1994), The Midwife’s Daughters (1997), The Golden Dress (1998), The Fog Garden: A Novel (2001), The Point (2003), The Apricot Colonel (2006), Murder on the Apricot Coast (2008), Valley of Grace (2009), and Goodbye Sweetheart (2015).

Halligan has published numerous short stories, including those in her Collected Stories (1997) and Shooting the Fox (2011), 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 and Words for Lucy (2022) is about her daughter’s death in 2004.

She contributed writing on life in the 1970s for a Canberra Museum and Gallery exhibition, and also developed a play, Elastics (performed in 1987). She has curated a permanent exhibition for Newcastle Regional Museum, How shall we live?, and has written a series of restaurant performances entitled Gastronomica for the Melbourne Festival.

She was a member of Seven Writers – a group of seven Canberra-based writers whose work vividly portrayed life ‘beneath the surface of Canberra’ – and as part of this collective she contributed to Canberra Tales (1988), later reissued as The Division of Love (1996), an anthology of short stories about life in Canberra. The work received an ACT Bicentennial Award.

A chronology of Halligan’s other awards includes:

Patricia Hackett Prize (1985)
H.M. Butterley-F. Earle Hooper Memorial Award (1986)
ABC Bicentennial Literary Awards (finalist 1988)
Steele Rudd Award (1989)
Geraldine Pascall Prize for Critical Writing (1990)
NBC Banjo Award for Fiction (shortlisted 1990)
Prize for Gastronomic Writing (1991)
Age Book of the Year Award (1992) & Age Book of the Year Award, Imaginative Writing Prize (1992)
ACT Book of the Year Award (1993)
NBC Banjo Award for Fiction (shortlisted 1993)
Nita Kibble Literary Award (1994, shortlisted 2002)
Newcastle University Newton John Award, for creative and innovative work (1994)
ACT Book Reviewer of the Year (1997 joint with Sara Dowse)
Age Book of the Year Award, Fiction Prize (shortlisted 1998)
Miles Franklin Award (shortlisted 1999)
The IMPAC Dublin Award (shortlisted 1999)
Queensland Premier’s Literary Award (shortlisted 2002)
Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book Sth East Asia and South Pacific (shortlisted 2004)
ACT Book of the Year Award (2004) for The Point
ACT Book of the Year Award (2010) for Valley of Grace
ACT Book of the Year (shortlisted 2023) for Words for Lucy

Halligan was Writer-in-Residence at Charles Sturt University in 1990 and a prolific writer of literature reviews and essays published in numerous major Australian newspapers and journals. She was chairperson of the Literature Board of the Australia Council (1992-1995) and has been chairperson of the Australian Word Festival.

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.’ The ACT Writers Centre was renamed Marion in 2022 in joint honour of Halligan and Marion Mahony Griffin.