Alison Goodman holds a BA in Professional Writing and Literature and a Master of Arts. She has taught creative writing at the University of Ballarat, and she was the 1999 D.J. O'Hearn Memorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. As of 2018, Goodman was completing a PhD at The University of Queensland.
Goodman's first novel, Singing the Dogstar Blues (1998), won the Aurealis Award for best young adult novel. She followed this with a standalone novel (Killing the Rabbit, republished as A New Kind of Death) and two significant series: Eon (2008-2011) and the Lady Helen series (ongoing as of 2017). The Eon / Eona duology has been translated into twelve languages and published in eighteen countries. She has also published a number of short stories.
Goodman has won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel (Eon) and the award for Best Young Adult novel twice (Lady Helen and the Dark Days Pact and Singing the Dogstar Blues), and has been longlisted and shortlisted for a range of other significant Australian and international awards, including the Davitt Award, the Norma K. Hemming Award, both the New South Wales and the Victorian Premier's Awards, and the James Tiptree Jr Award.