Marcella Polain was born in Singapore and migrated to Australia at the age of two with her Irish father and Armenian mother.

[1] Polain studied Literature and Creative Arts at Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University).

Her first novel, The Edge of the World, based on her family's survival of the Armenian genocide, won the University of Western Australia's Higher Degree by Research Prize for Publications, and was nominated for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Regional best first book award.

She has been a recipient of an Australia Council Grant for New Work of Fiction, which resulted in the publication of Driving into the Sun (2019).

In 2012, at Edith Cowan University and with visual artist Paul Uhlmann, she co-founded the micropress 'fold editions', dedicated to the creation of hand-made books.