Born in Portsmouth, Dawn Farnham emigrated to Australia with her parents when she was two, settling in Perth. As a teenager in the 1960s, she returned to England, where she latter married an English foreign correspondent, with whom she travelled and lived throughout Asia. On a return to England in the 1990s, she studied Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies and obtained an MA in English at King's College. After a period in Singapore, where she began her first novel, she returned to Perth, where she began a PhD at Edith Cowan University.