Christine Piper was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1979, to an Australian father and a Japanese mother.

[1] Her family lived in Seoul for a year due to her father's work (her sister was born in Tokyo).

Piper attended Cheltenham Girls High School where she excelled at English and Visual Arts.

[2] She won the 2014 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay for "Unearthing the Past",[3] which she also wrote for her Doctor of Creative Arts degree.

She received a 2017 Australia Council individual artist grant[4] and was the 2019 Copyright Agency's New Writer's Fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney.