Falconer is the only child of two graphic designers. She studied for her undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney and completed a Ph.D. in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne.^[2]

She is the author of the novels The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers (which was republished in Australian paperback as The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers and Selected Stories). She also wrote Sydney, a personal history of her hometown, for the Australian Cities series.^[3][4]

As of 2019^[update] she was a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney.^[5] She has served as judge of a number of literary awards, including the Calibre Prize (2015), the Stella Prize (2017), and the NSW Premier's Literary Awards (2017).^[5]

In 1998, Falconer was the recipient of the Marten Bequest Scholarship.^[6]

Falconer's books have been shortlisted for major Australian and international prizes across the fields of fiction, nonfiction, innovation, history, and biography.^[4][7]

In 2018, she won the Pascall Prize for "The Opposite of Glamour," which was published in the Sydney Review of Books.^[8]

Fiction edit

• The Service of Clouds, Macmillan, 1997, ISBN 978-0-330-36027-2
• The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, Picador, 2005, ISBN 978-0-330-42179-9

Nonfiction edit

• The Opposite of Glamour, Sydney Review of Books, 2017
• Sydney, New South, 2020 [First published 2010], ISBN 9781742237084
• Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss, Scribner, 2021, ISBN 9781760857820

As editor edit

• The Penguin Book of the Road, an anthology of stories of the road (Camberwell: Penguin, 2008)
• The Best Australian Stories 2008 (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2008).
• The Best Australian Stories 2009 (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2009).