Cirrus@Austlit

At the age of five, Phil Brown moved to Hong Kong where his family was engaged in the construction business. In Hong Kong, he attended Kowloon Junior School and King George V School where he regularly took part in poetry and prose recitations at the annual Hong Kong Schools Music Festival. With his family, Brown returned to Queensland's Gold Coast in 1970 and completed his secondary schooling at Miami State High School, where he developed a love of surfing and in interest in writing. That interest was further explored at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba, where he majored in journalism and studied literature with the man who was to become his literary mentor, the poet Bruce Dawe.

Brown wrote journalism, poetry and short fiction for campus publications. Later, he worked at Radio 4GG on the Gold Coast as an advertising copywriter before moving to central Queensland to start a career in journalism - first as a cadet on The Burnett Herald in Monto in 1979 and later as a graded journalist at The Morning Bulletin in Rockhampton for two years where he became arts and literary editor and wrote regular short stories for the group's community newspapers. He has performed at Warana Writers Week, Brisbane Festival, Metro Arts, Somerset Celebration of Literature, Wordpool, Queensland Irish Association, Hawthorn Readings (Melb.), La Mama (Melb.) and his poetry has featured on Radio National's Poetica program.

As a journalist, he has worked in Central Queensland, on the Gold Coast, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. In 2004, he was senior writer for Brisbane News, where he writes on the arts, entertainment and travel. In 2018, he was Senior Writer, Lifestyle for News Queensland.

He has served on the management committee of the Brisbane Writers Festival (including as chairman from 2005 to 2008), and has been a judge in the poetry prize at the Somerset Celebration of Literature and the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards fiction prize.