As a child Merle Glasson lived in various outback towns. She was educated at Sydney University where she completed a degree in modern languages. She taught for some years before moving with her family to many country towns and to the Blue Mountains. Her poems first appeared in The Bulletin and various women's journals in the 1950s. She had an impressive publishing record of over a hundred poems which express aspects of the Australian experience. In 1982 she published her first collection of poems, Landscapes, which was followed by Gently Jolting Back to Earth (1986), Selected Poems (1988), and Summing Up (2000).
Glasson won many awards for her work - one of her greatest achievements being the winning the Grenfell Henry Lawson prize in 1968 and then, in 1993, receiving two highly commended placings in that same award.
In 1994 Glasson published Halcyon City a science fiction novel set in the near future with chillingly real possibilities - manufactured trees that don't drop leaves and daffodils encased in plastic for protection against dust.
Writing over eight decades, Merle Glasson died in Port Macquarie in 2002, a few weeks short of her ninety-first birthday.
