More About Anne

Anne Morgan was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1954 and was educated at St Joseph’s School and Mt Carmel College.

As the second eldest child in a family of six boys and two girls, Anne used to try to dodge the nightly mountain of washing up by offering to put her younger brothers to bed and read them a bedtime stories. This suited Anne and her brothers, Simon and Dominic, admirably, and for years they enjoyed classic children’s stories such as the Moomintroll series by Tove Jannson, Winnie the Pooh, by A.A. Milne, The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham and the Narnia Books of C.S. Lewis.

Anne trained as an English, Drama and Biology teacher and was appointed, somewhat perplexingly, as a Social Science teacher at Burnie High School, Tasmania, in 1976. She then taught English as a Second Language on remote Indigenous settlements in the Northern Territory, where her pupils dubbed her ‘Anne Morgin the Pirate’, thus sewing the imaginative seeds for her future Clawbeak books.

Anneworked as an actor touring outback schools with the Queensland Theatre Company before returning to Tasmania to teach literacy and life skills to of unemployed young people. She spent a year living in Europe before returning to Tasmania and completing a Master of Education degree at the University of Tasmania.

She then worked for Community Aid Abroad (now Oxfam Australia) and in various public service jobs, including Aboriginal education and employment, staff training, research, journalism and public affairs.

Anne’s children, Nick and Miranda, were born in 1985 and 1988, and she was delighted again to have the opportunity to expose her children to a new crop of children’s authors such as Mem Fox, Pamela Allen, Roald Dahl and Paul Jenning.

Miranda, who was a constant source of joy and inspiration to Anne and others around her, died in a car accident in October 2006, a week after her eighteenth birthday.

Read about Anne's Literary Credits .