Christine Piper was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1979, to an Australian father and a Japanese mother. She has had to explain her unusual birthplace ever since (for the record: her family lived in Seoul for a year due to her father's job at a trading firm). She moved to Australia when she was one. She has studied creative writing at Macquarie University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2011 summer fiction session), Queens University of Charlotte (North Carolina) and the University of Technology, Sydney, where she wrote her first novel as part of her Doctor of Creative Arts degree. In between studying, she has had a decade-long career in magazines (as a sub-editor and freelance writer), travelled extensively and taught English and studied Japanese in Japan.

Her articles and reviews have been published in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sun-Herald, Australian Book Review, GQ, NYLON, Silverlimbo, Women’s Health, Prevention and Voiceworks, among others.

Her short fiction has been published in Seizure, SWAMP and Things That Are Found In Trees and Other Stories. She won second prize in the 2012 Margaret River Short Story Competition.

She won the the 2014 Calibre Essay Prize, the 2014 Guy Morrison Award for Literary Journalism and was the 2013 Alice Hayes writing fellow at Ragdale in Illinois. She is a recipient of an Australia Council Individual Artist grant, an Australian Postgraduate Award and the Copyright Agency's Creative Industries' Career Fund, and has received fellowships for residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Varuna and Bundanon. Her debut novel, After Darkness, won the 2014 The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award. It was selected as one of the English texts for the Victorian Certificate of Education in 2018 and 2019.

She was the 2019 Copyright Agency New Writer-in-Residence at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she worked on her second novel.