Lucy Hamilton was born in Sheringham, Norfolk, the youngest of six children (including the four and a half minutes between her twin sister and herself). Her mother was born in Paris and grew up in Toulouse (of Catholic and Jewish heritage) and her father grew up in Liverpool. She left school at seventeen and lived in Paris for two years before returning to continue her education. She worked as a teacher in many parts of the UK before getting married and settling in Cambridge where she was Head of Year at a local comprehensive and, for a time, simultaneously Acting Head of the Languages Faculty. She later worked with international students (mainly Chinese and South Korean) at an independent school in Kent. In 2010 she moved back to Cambridge where she now works as a freelance tutor.

Lucy was joint recipient of the Poetry School Award 2006/7. Her poems and translations have appeared in many journals including Modern Poetry in Translation, The Rialto, Shearsman and Poetry Wales and in anthologies I am twenty people! (Enitharmon, 2007) and This Line is not for Turning: an Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry (Cinnamon, 2011). Ten poems from her pamphlet Sonnets for my Mother (Hearing Eye, 2009) have been translated into Arabic. In December 2010 Lucy became the first woman and first non-Muslim European in the world to appear, by live satellite recording, reading her poems at the Havana Café, Mecca. Last year she co-judged the inaugural Cambridge University Benjamin Zephaniah Poetry Competition. Lucy co-edits Long Poem Magazine.