Chris Mansell studied Economics at the University of Sydney – because she’d read Das Kapital as a teenager and thought economics was the way to understand what is going on. She spent the first ten years of her life on the central coast of NSW, and then she moved to Niugini (Papua New Guinea). At 14, she decided she would be a poet. She has won the Queensland Premier’s Award for Poetry, Amelia Chapbook Award (USA), the Meanjin Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize, and was short-listed for the National Book Council Award and the NSW Premier’s Award.