Alison Edwards was born on a Wednesday, just in time for breakfast. She shares her birthday with the anniversary of the original Women’s March during the French Revolution and the NY Times publication by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey that birthed the #metoo movement. She is not entirely clear on the significance of these facts.

Alison was raised on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, where she formed a close relationship with the local library. Because borrowers were only allowed ten books at a time and going to the library meant driving into town, her mother banned her from reading more than one book a day. Meanwhile, her father prohibited her from reading while walking home from school in case she wandered into traffic with her nose stuck in a book. With such parents, it’s a wonder she became literate at all.

Growing up, Alison had an inexplicable obsession with Germany. She attributes this to having read The Diary of Anne Frank, which is doubly strange, since Anne did not have a great relationship with Germany. Alison nonetheless studied German and spent her exchange year lounging around Lake Constance. She also took a degree in Journalism, which seemed more like it might lead to a real job than Creative Writing. Since journalism expressly involves communicating with the other human beings, she was exceptionally unsuited to the profession.

Alison then moved to the Netherlands, where she worked at Maastricht University as an editor, by virtue of having worked for five minutes at a failing Sydney publishing company, and a translator, by virtue of speaking German, which turned out to be Not Dutch. To rectify these gaping deficiencies, she was sent off to get a master’s in linguistics, which she hadn’t known was a thing.

Next, she moved to England to pursue a PhD in linguistics at King’s College, Cambridge. There she spent four years trying to figure out where Zadie Smith might have sat in the college library. Her dissertation was accepted with no corrections. The same cannot be said for the revision process for her debut novel. 

Alison is now based in Amsterdam with her husband, a Dutch professor of statistics or something, and two young children with unpronounceable names. She works as an editor and translator, sometime academic, and writer of the occasional polemic on language policy for Dutch newspapers. In 2017 she began writing Two Daughters using The 90 Day Novel by Alan Watt. She finished said novel seven years later and would like her money back, thank you very much.