Lyn Moir was born in Glasgow in 1934. She has never lived there, but has lived in many other places in Scotland. With a Scots father and a mother whose father was Scots and whose mother’s ancestors had all been in New England by 1635, she has never felt she fitted in completely anywhere. She went to St. Andrews University, where she graduated in 1959 with an MA in Spanish and French. After starting up a Spanish department in the University of Auckland, NZ, she returned to Britain and married, living in Southampton. She had written poetry from the age of twelve, but stopped when her husband objected, still in her head considering herself a writer.
 
Widowed in 1983, she returned to Scotland, to St. Andrews to live, in 2001. The years between, in Southampton, were an outpouring of poetry, much influenced by John Greening and his Indian King workshops in Camelford. She has always found workshops a huge source of inspiration.
 
Shortly after her move, Arrowhead published her pamphlet Me and Galileo (2001), followed in 2003 by a full collection, Breakers’ Yard, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Her second pamphlet, Easterly, Force 10, was published in November 2009 by Calder Wood Press. 2004 also brought her a Hawthornden Fellowship. She wrote most of the poems in her second full collection, Velázquez’s Riddle, in the castle. It was due for publication in 2008, but due to the vagaries of small presses was finally published by Calder Wood Press in 2011. She was the recipient of a Writer’s Bursary from the Scottish Arts Council in 2005.
 
Lyn’s poems have also appeared in several anthologies, including Loosely Grouped (1999), Grouped More Loosely (2001) (both out of print), Parents, Making Worlds, Four Caves of the Heart, Images of Women, Prague Tales, (2006 Warsaw), Budapest Tales, (2008 Warsaw) and Women’s Work (Seren 2009). She has completed a fifth collection, on two roads not taken, the Silk Road and the road to Santiago, and is looking for a publisher. Since her return to Scotland she has become a painter, which cross-fertilises her poetry (she thinks).