Katie Donovan was born in 1962 and grew up on a farm in Co. Wexford, but for most of her life she has lived in Dun Laoghaire, a suburb of Dublin. She was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the University of California at Berkeley. She lived in Hungary for a year before returning to Ireland where she was a journalist with the Irish Times for 13 years. She qualified as an Amatsu practitioner (a form of Japanese osteopathy) and combines this work with teaching Creative Writing at IADT, the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire. She has two children, Phoebe and Felix.

Her latest book of poetry, Rootling: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), draws on three previous collections, Watermelon Man (1993), Entering the Mare (1997) and Day of the Dead (2002), together with a whole collection of new work. She is the author of Irish Women Writers: Marginalised by Whom? (Raven Arts Press, 1988), and has co-edited two anthologies, Dublines (with Brendan Kennelly), published by Bloodaxe Books in 1996, and Ireland's Women: Writings Past and Present (with A. Norman Jeffares and Brendan Kennelly), published by Kyle Cathie (Britain) and Gill and Macmillan (Ireland) in 1994.