Tara June Winch was born in Wollongong in 1983. She is of Wiradjuri and English heritage. At 17, Winch left home to travel across Australia.
She studied for a Bachelor of Arts, Indigenous Studies at Ginibi College, Southern Cross University, but left after the manuscript for her first book won the David Unaipon Award in 2004. It was subsequently published in 2006 by UQP. She was chosen for the 2008-2009 Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative in which she was partnered with Nigerian writer and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Winch was an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Project and is currently ambassador for Children's Ground.
Winch's first novel — Swallow the Air (2006) — was on the HSC curriculum for Standard and Advanced English from 2009 to 2019. Her writing has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Griffith Review, VOGUE, Harpers Bazaar, Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, VICE, and McSweeneys.
In 2016, Winch published a collection of short stories, After the Carnage.
Her 2019 novel, The Yield, won the Miles Franklin Award, the Prime Minister's Award for Fiction, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, People's Choice, and Book of the Year at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the Voss Literary Prize, as well as others, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.
Winch is based in France where she lives with her family.