[1] It was written as part of an Australia Council for the Arts residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, Ireland.
She studied Film and English at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, graduating with a Bachelor in Fine Arts with Honours and completed a Master of Letters in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.
She wrote the "Anouk" and "Aisha" episodes of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television mini-series The Slap, the original adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas' novel of the same name, which won the 2012 AWGIE Awards for Television Mini-Series (Adaptation).
Ballou has also written episodes of BBC One/FX Taboo, Channel 4/AMC Humans, BBC One's Case Histories (series 2, "Nobody's Darling"), ITV's Scott & Bailey, National Geographic's TV movie American Blackout, co-written with Ewan Morrison, and Family, directed by Shaun Gladwell in the anthology film The Turning, adapted from Tim Winton's book of short stories and screened in the Berlinale Special Galas section of the 64th Berlin International Film Festival.
[4] She is also the author of the novels Father Lands (Picador, 2002)[3] and Aphelion (Picador , 2007), as well as the picture book One Blue Sock (Random House, 2007) (with illustrations by Stephen Michael King).