Gig Ryan was born in 1956 and grew up in Melbourne. She has published six collections of poetry in Australia: The Division of Anger (1981); Manners of an Astronaut (1984); The Last Interior (1986); Excavation (1990); Pure and Applied (1998), which won the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry; and Heroic Money (2001).

Ryan is also a freelance reviewer and a songwriter, performing and releasing three albums with Disband (1998) and Driving Past (1999, 2006). She lives in Melbourne, and has been poetry editor of the Melbourne Age since 1998.

Her first UK publication, Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), was published in Australia in 2011 by Giramondo under the title New and Selected Poems.