Alwynne Pritchard was born in Glasgow in 1968 and as a teenager began having composition lessons with her father, Gwyn Pritchard. She then studied with Robert Saxton at the Guildhall School of Music, and later with Melanie Daiken, Justin Connolly and Michael Finnissy at the Royal Academy of Music, where she was awarded many prizes for her work. In 1997 she was awarded a research scholarship by the University of Bristol and in 2003 received a PhD in composition. In the summer of 2000 Alwynne was awarded a Visions of Norway scholarship for a two-month artist's residency at the Kulturhuset USF Verftet, Bergen and later returned for an extended residency three years later. In April 2007 she completed a one-year residency at the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Bavaria after which she spent a year living in Berlin.  In September 2008 Alwynne became the Artistic Director of the Borealis Festival (www.borealisfestival.no) in Bergen Norway, where she now lives.

In 2002 the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance of Alwynne’s orchestral work Critical Mass, and in March 2007 her piano concerto Map of the Moon was premiered by Nicolas Hodges and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Decoy, created at the Heinrich Strobel Stiftung, Freiburg, in 2005 for the Donaueschingen Musiktage, was awarded the special prize given by the Foundation Ton Bruynèl, STEIM and the Foundation GAUDEAMUS. Recent commissions include Frame, a work for the Athelas Sinfonietta Denmark for ensemble, live electronics, tape and film as part of the European Integra project, premiered at the Sound Around festival, Copenhagen, in October 2007; Don’t touch me, you don’t know where I’ve been, a music theatre/flute concerto for her own voice, Norwegian flautist Bjørnar Habbestad, asamisimasa ensemble and live electronics (developed by Thorolf Thuestad at BEK in Bergen) premiered at the Borealis festival in March 2008; and Flutterby, for electric guitar and two computers for Luc Houtkamp's POW ensemble.

Over the last decade and a half Alwynne's music has been performed by leading players and ensembles throughout Europe and America, including the Arditti String Quartet, Apartment House, The Bournemouth Sinfonietta, Christian Dierstein, The Duke String Quartet, de ereprijs (Holland), Ensemble Recherche (Germany), Gemini, Nicolas Hodges, Ixion, Kaida (Holland), John Kenny, Carin Levine, The London Sinfonietta, Lontano, Darragh Morgan, New Music Players, Nieuw Ensemble, Ian Pace, Jonathan Powell, Maja Ratkje (Norway), Reservoir, Elena Riu, Jarle Rotevatn (Norway), Sarah Nicolls and the Schubert and Uroboros Ensembles. As well as being regularly heard in London and around the country, Alwynne's music has also received performances in America, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Poland and Norway, and has often been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, as well as abroad.

During the mid-1990s Alwynne studied voice with Linda Hirst and later performed as guest vocalist with Apartment House in works by Gerhard Stäbler and Cornelius Cardew, as well as performing with them in the Cutting Edge tour of her own work Impossibility and giving the premiere of her Geometry of Pain I at the Wittener Tage für neue Kammer musik in 2002. This performance was later released as part of a festival documentation disc on the WDR label and she recorded her own work Kit for voice and electric guitar as part of Invisible Cities, a disc of her music originally released on the Metier label. In October 2005, Alwynne released Subterfuge In Vitro, an album of British Indian music, created in collaboration with the London-based Tabla player and producer Kuljit Bhamra. This disc is available on the keda label and distributed throughout Europe by RSK/BMG.

In 2005 Alwynne formed the Bergen/London-based improvisation quintet FAT BATTERY (www.fatbattery.com), and has also performed as a vocalist with computer programmer Thorolf Thuestad and flautist Rowland Sutherland in the trio Myrtle; with Berlin-based hardware electronics instrument builder/improviser Guido Henneböhl in the duo Ding Dong (www.dingdongism.de); with Austrian pianist Judith Unterpertinger as unterPritperTingerchard; and with the visual artist Claire Zakiewicz in Ear to Eye.

From 2001 until 2008 Alwynne taught composition at Trinity College of Music in London, where she still holds a visiting post. She has also worked regularly as a project leader for the BIT20 Ensemble’s music education projects in Norway and abroad and presented many contemporary music programmes for BBC Radio 3, including Music in Our Time, Midnight Oil, Music Matters, Hear and Now and Discovering Music.