Lyn Moir was born in Glasgow in 1934 of Scots and part-American parents. In a peripatetic childhood and youth, she attended seventeen schools, Vassar College, and St. Andrews University, where she obtained a degree in Spanish and French. She started up the Spanish department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Lyn has written poetry from childhood, becoming seriously interested in it, and in practising forms in the 1950s and early 1960s. She did not write while married, but once widowed, published again in 1989, and regularly since then. She has had many poems in magazines, including The Rialto, Agenda and Poetry Scotland, and brought out several pamphlets with her own publishing company, LG Press. She has been has been a Hawthornden Fellow and has had work included in New Writing Scotland.
Lyn returned to St. Andrews in 2001.