Born on a stormy night, daughter of Helen Watters and Frank Norton, Ann-Marie was one of six children. She said 'My mother struggled through the storm in an open cart to set me free. And then forgot me in the hospital. I went to thirteen different schools. We moved a lot' (Hope & Fear, 1994, endpapers).
She studied at the University of Adelaide, South Australia (SA), gained a Diploma of Education and became a teacher of English. She met Irenej ('Irush'or 'Myk') Mykyta, a member of the Ukranian community, at the university's Freshers' Concert, and six weeks later they decided that they would get married. She was 18 when they married, and they had three children. One of her daughters, Juliet, aged 16, disappeared in 1977 and was later discovered to have been one of the 'Truro murder' victims. Anne-Marie set up an organization for support for victims of crime, and expressed her own personal struggle in her book It's a Long Way to Truro (1981), the proceeds of which were used to fund the Juliet Mykyta Memorial Scholarship.
She had begun writing poetry at eight, but now she became a professional writer. She says that she turned to writing as a means of understanding. In 1990 she was awarded the Carclew Fellowship to work full-time in youth theatre for six months. She organized the Young Playwrights' Centre. She wrote an ABC for New Writers (1990), and in 1995 the State Library of South Australia published I Want Somebody to Know: Carers Talk to Anne-Marie Mykyta about Life. She held journal writing classes for women, and worked with girls in the Remand Centre. She was Vice-President of the SA Association for Gifted and Talented children. She had a time of severe illness with a kidney disorder in 1994, and died of cancer in 1996. When she knew that she was terminally ill, she wrote to her friends, 'We learn from the things that happen to us. We grow, or we shrivel, according to whether we reach out positively or negatively. We can't change the past, but we can take hold of how the past changes us' ('Anne-Marie Mykyta: A Writer of Courage', The Writers' Centre Newsletter November 1966, pp. 4-5).
