Kona Macphee was born in London and grew up in Australia, where she worked as a waitress, shop assistant and apprentice motorbike mechanic. She studied musical composition at the Sydney Conservatorium, violin at the University of Sydney, and computer science and robotics at Monash University, later taking an M.Sc. at Cambridge as a Commonwealth Scholar. She received an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1998, and has published three collections with Bloodaxe, Tails (2004); Perfect Blue (2010), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2011; and What Long Miles (2013). She is a freelance writer and software developer, and lives in Crieff, Perthshire.