About 

Christina Thompson is the author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, which won the 2020 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and the 2019 NSW Premier’s General History Award, and was a finalist for the 2020 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, the 2019 Mountbatten Maritime Award, the 2019 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards. Her first book, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All, was a finalist for the 2009 NSW Premier’s Literary Award and the 2010 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

A dual citizen of the United States and Australia, she was born in Switzerland and grew up outside Boston. She has a BA from Dartmouth College and a PhD from the University of Melbourne and held post-doctoral fellowships at the East-West Center in Honolulu and the University of Queensland before becoming editor of the Australian literary journal Meanjin. Since 2000 she has been the editor of Harvard Review. The recipient of an NEH Public Scholar Award, as well as fellowships from the NEA, the Australia Council, and ArtsVictoria, she was the 2023 Creative Arts Fellow at the National Library of Australia. She teaches writing at Harvard University Extension and lives outside Boston with her husband and three sons.