AustLit

Writer and critic Elizabeth Lawson, a grand-niece of Henry Lawson, was born at Campbelltown, NSW, and brought up nearby in Ingleburn. She was educated in state schools, and received a Master of Arts (Honours) in English from Sydney University, and a PhD at the University of Western Australia (1983). In 1963 she married and had a son and a daughter.

Lawson has travelled extensively overseas. In the mid-1960s she spent a year in Canada, teaching literature at Queen's University. After her return to Australia, she taught at different Australian universities (La Trobe, Curtin, Murdoch, Victoria, University of New England, University of Tasmania), and eventually held a tenured position at the Australian Defence Force Academy until 1998, when she became an independent writer and scholar. She remarried in 1996 and lives near Canberra.

She has been writing poetry for many years and her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies in Australia and North America.