Wenche Ommundsen was born in Kristiansand, Norway in 1952, and has lived in Norway, the United States, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and, since 1980, in Australia. Ommundsen was awarded degrees from the University of Lausanne (1978), London University (1980) and the University of Melbourne (1986). From 1996 she lectured in the Arts faculty of Deakin University and in 2004 was appointed an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Geelong campus. She has written literary and cultural criticism, with particular interests in the areas of contemporary fiction, metafiction, multicultural writing, and the sociology of cultural production. In 1996 Ommundsen took over the coordination of the Multicultural bibliography project at Deakin University (since incorporated into AustLit as the Multicultural subset). She received grants from the Australian Research Council in 2003 and 2005 for projects on Australian literature.
