Lucy Hamilton grew up in Norfolk with her French mother and English father, the youngest of six children including a twin sister. She has enjoyed a career in teaching, including Chinese students for seven years at Ashford School, Kent.
 
She co-edited Long Poem Magazine from 2008 to 2018. Since 2015 she has worked for Cam Rivers Publishing, a UK-China partnership based at King’s College, Cambridge, and has enjoyed several work-related visits to China. She has published a pamphlet Sonnets for my Mother (Hearing Eye, 2009), and two collections of prose poems: Stalker (Shearsman Books, 2012) shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; and Of Heads & Hearts (Shearsman Books, 2018). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 and 2019, and her translations from the French have featured in Modern Poetry in Translation and Agenda.
 
Recently-published work includes photomontages created as an integral process for poems exploring her extended family through history, geography and myth. She is now working on poems which draw upon Alfred Huang’s translation of the I Ching and on her experiences in China.
 
She has devised and run workshops for The Poetry School, Staffordshire University and Cambridge University, including the Scott Polar Research Institute, the English Faculty and the Centre for Creative Writing ICE.
 
Review comments for Stalker, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection:
 
 

Hamilton’s keen curiosity about language and its etymology, consistent receptivity to place and her skilful interplay between ghosts and dream-worlds and lived life, are all abiding pleasures of the work.

Ellen Cranitch, Poetry London

Another element integral to these externalised reflections of the self is chance, that prophetic driver of coincidence. Hamilton explores this in poems explicitly about her twin sister… Prophecy, too, persists in the birth of meaning, and in etymologies. Words are stalked through the ages by their roots and, by using them, we are also dogged by what they signify… Ultimately these types of ‘stalking’ are what gives life its viscosity…

Sandeep Parmar, PN Review

There is, by implication, an existential questioning of what it means to be a self. How much of what we are is defined by the way others perceive us? How is it possible to live authentically? Stalker is a courageous and beautiful book. It is one I shall keep returning to.

Ian Seed, Stride