Anne Bartlett spent her childhood in the Murray Mallee and the Adelaide Hills. After leaving school she spent a year as a Rotary Exchange Student in South Africa before returning to Adelaide where she completed an Honours degree in English and Drama at Flinders University. She married her husband Russell in 1973 and after a brief stint of secondary teaching stayed at home to care for their growing family of three sons and a daughter. Russell's work took them to India and this trip prompted her first freelance writing. On Being magazine commissioned a series of articles and later appointed her as South Australian editorial associate.
Anne Bartlett has worked at various times as an editor, ghost-writer, columnist (humour), novelist, biographer, feature and children's writer, and as writer in residence in various schools. In 1993 and in 1997 she won Arts South Australia Grants; in 1996 she won a Varuna Special Fellowship and in 1998 she won an Arts South Australia Creative Writing Scholarship.
After completing a Master of Arts in Creative Writing, she began work in 1999 on commissions from State Aboriginal Affairs, recording the lives of three elders. She enrolled in a Phd in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, as part of which she completed her first adult fiction, 'Knitting: A Novel' and the accompanying exegetical essay explores knitting and representations of knitting in contemporary society.
In her early life Anne worked in various jobs such as fruitpicking, cleaning, designer knitting and factory work and she says that these 'have provided a rich source of writing material' (Source: personal correspondence).