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Alison Croggon

Australian poet, playwright and fantasy novelist

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 25, 2026
Entity authorityQ535252
Source-derived summary

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

Life and career

Born in the Transvaal, South Africa, Alison Croggon's family moved to England before settling in Australia, first in Ballarat then Melbourne. 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 highly commended in the 1995 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. Four novels of the fantasy genre series Pellinor have been published. She also founded and 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. In 2014, Iain Grandage (composer) and Croggon (librettist) collaborated to present The Riders, based on Tim Winton's novel The Riders. Its world premiere was in Melbourne.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Alison Croggon” is australian poet, playwright and fantasy novelist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Alison, Croggon and Australian, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1962, 1995, 2000, 2014—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1962-01-01. For this dossier, Alison, Croggon and Australian is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “australian poet, playwright and fantasy novelist” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q535252. VIAF identifies the subject as 119702210. The Library of Congress control number is n97050288. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1995, 2000 and 2014.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Alison Croggon”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Alison Croggon primary sources, Alison Croggon archive and Alison research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Alison Croggon”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Alison Croggon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.