Vicki Raymond is the daughter of a Tasmanian mother and a South Australian father. She spent her childhood years in Adelaide, South Australia and then moved to Tasmania with her parents in 1965 where they lived in various country towns (including Geeveston) and in Hobart. Raymond graduated from the University of Tasmania with a BA (Hons.) and then worked as the editor of University News before moving to the United Kingdom in 1981. In London she worked at the Australian High Commission as a finance clerk and developed her poetry writing skills.
In 1987 Raymond was one of four poets to represent Australia at the Struga Poetry Evenings in Yugoslavia. Some of the poems in her collection Small Arm Practice have been set to music by English composer Patrick Morris. Raymond's poetry has been described as 'tough-minded in its content and its formal severity' in Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century ed. Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann (1991).