Born in Wellington, Jennifer Compton attended drama school in Auckland for two years before going to Australia in the early seventies and attending NIDA Playwrights Studio. She began writing for ABCs soap Certain Women, moving on to radio plays that were produced in both Australia and New Zealand. The Goose's Bridle won an AWGIE award in 1976.
In 1974, Jennifer's play No Man's Land (retitled Crossfire) was joint winner of the Newcastle Playwriting Competition (with John Romeril's The Floating World). Premiering in Sydney, it had a season at Downstage (directed by Elric Hooper) and was part of the Heartache and Sorrow Company's prize-winning season at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1979.
Other stage plays include Julia's Song, Barefoot and The Big Picture.

Jennifer is also known as a short story writer and poet. In 1975 she won the Katherine Mansfield Award and the BNZ Award for her short story The Man Who Died Twice. She was writer-in-residence at the University of Canterbury in 1980.

Her poetry has been published in journals in Australasia, the United Kingdom, Italy and America. In 1995 she was awarded the NSW Writers' Fellowship by the NSW Ministry for the Arts. This was the first time that the fellowhip had been awarded for poetry.

In 2006 she spent six months in residence at the Whiting Library Studio in Rome. A new book of poetry called Barefoot will be published in 2008.