The mother of six children, Lorraine Marwood has worked as a literacy teacher. She began writing in the early 1990s. She has worked as a dairy farmer in Central Victoria, and it is this experience that informed her award-winning verse novel Star Jumps. The influence of farming and rural life is also evident in her gentle work of grief and relocation, Leave Taking.
Her poetry, largely concerned with aspects of rural life and rural isolation, has been published in magazines, anthologies and newspapers in the UK, the USA, New Zealand and Canada. Marwood's first collection of poetry, Skinprint (1996), was highly commended in the winter selection of the Poetry Club of Australia.