Born in Yorkshire, Jill Dobson grew up in country Australia and now lives in Glasgow, after stints in Melbourne, London, Moscow, Edinburgh and Tokyo. The Inheritors, her first novel, was written during her last years of school. It was originally published by the University of Queensland Press in 1988, followed by Time To Go (1991) and A Journey to Distant Mountains (2001).

In 2021 Jill won the TLC Pen Factor Award for the first chapter of The Woman in the House Next Door, a historical novel based on the 1954 defection of two KGB agents from the Soviet Embassy in Canberra. She is also the recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship from Creative Scotland and an Australia Council for the Arts Literature Award.

In January 2024, Jill released a new edition of The Inheritors, rewritten for the twenty-first century, as her first venture into indie publishing.

She has also published scholarly articles on Japanese literature and works as an editor for an academic journal.