AustLit

Journalist Margaret Jones grew up in Queensland and worked for the ABC in Rockhampton as a stringer then as a regional correspondent from 1948-1953. She moved to Sydney in 1953, and worked with The Mirror and with the Sydney Morning Herald, becoming Foreign and Literary Editor for the Sydney Morning Herald. She worked as a foreign correspondent in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and in Asia in the 1970s, opening a bureau for the Sydney Morning Herald in Beijing in 1973 after the Whitlam government established diplomatic relations with China. She has travelled widely and spoken of her experiences in several recorded interviews. Her novels are both set in Asian countries.

In addition to her fiction, she has published her impressions of English politics in the 1980s (Thatcher's Kingdom, 1984) and has written about the profession of journalism, (Pressures on the Press, 1986). She served three terms as journalist member of the Press Council, retiring from it in 1998.