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Jane Downing was born in Australia in 1962 but was taken to live on Manus, a remote island of Papua New Guinea, three weeks later. She has since lived in Tanzania, Ireland, Indonesia, the (then) USSR, China, the Marshall Islands and Guam, as well as Australia. Her education was at the closest school, whichever country she was in at the time, and she went on to gain a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Sociology from the Australian National University and later a Graduate Diploma of Education.
Her first job was at the American Embassy in Moscow. She has also worked for the British Embassy in Beijing, the United Nations in the Marshall Islands (as an Australian Volunteer Abroad), the Australian Public Service, the National Gallery, two Youth Refuges, a Domestic Violence Crisis Service, and as a Community Development Officer for an Aboriginal Corporation. She currently tutors in creative writing at Charles Sturt University.
While living and working in the Marshall Islands, where truth was often stranger than fiction, Jane Downing began to write. She has since had over a hundred short stories and a similar number of poems published in Australia and overseas. A collection of her short stories, Searching for the Volcano (fourW press), appeared in 1999.
Her first novel, The Trickster, was published in 2003 by Pandanus Books and her second, The Lost Tribe, was released by the same publisher in 2005. She is currently writing another novel as part of the Doctor of Creative Arts program at the University of Technology Sydney.
Jane Downing has lived in Albury for the last fifteen years.
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