Jennifer Compton was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1949. In the early '70s she emigrated to Sydney, Australia with her husband Matthew O'Sullivan. They now live outside Melbourne, Australia.

After attending the NIDA Playwrights Studio, her play No Man's Land (later Crossfire) jointly won the Newcastle Playwriting Competition (with John Romeril's A Floating World) in 1974. It was premiered at the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney in 1975 and published by Currency Press in 1976.
Her stage play The Big Picture was premiered at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney in 1997 and was published by Currency Press in 1999.
In recent years she has mostly written short fiction and poetry. A book of poems, Parker & Quink, was published in 2004, and another, Barefoot, in 2010.

National Library of Australia Catalogue - http://nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2385725 - http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1317255