Daphne Marlatt was born to English parents, Arthur and Edrys Lupprian Buckle, in Melbourne, Australia on July 11, 1942.
After traveling around the continent with her husband, Gordon Alan Marlatt, a clinical psychologist, she then settled down for a while in Bloomington, Indiana where she received her M.A.
Robert Lecker, in the 1978 article "Perceiving It as It Stands" from Canadian Literature, says "Marlatt has every right to join Kay and Gerda in flight, for their predicament, and the development of their story, serve as a metaphor for the problems of growth encountered by a poet struggling to break away from the frames imposed by established word patterns and the falsities implied by a world view which categorizes experience, storytelling it in standardized form, as if the motion of living was always the same, always sane."
This piece is about a small fishing village that Marlatt explains the relation to its history as a camp for Japanese Canadians during World War II.
Also, in 1980 she had, Net Work: Selected Writing, published, which contains new "confidence and authority", according to Fred Wah, a professor at the University of Calgary.
He goes on to say that "the flow of town and history, of the Japanese people and the cannery, especially of the river and language, are more securely rooted in place and concentrated in the writing consciousness than in any other of her books."
Marlatt describes her novel, Ana Historic, in a 2003 interview with Sue Kossew, a professor at the University of New South Wales, as follows: "I like rubbing the edges of document and memory/fiction against one another.
That's why I used such a hodgepodge of sources in Ana Historic: a little nineteenth-century and very local journalism that sounds like a gossip column, a 1906 school textbook, various historical accounts, some contemporary feminist theory, and a school teacher's diary from 1873 that was completely fictitious."
She offers her protagonist a way out into a new order that breaks with the law of the father, creating a "monstrous" text that explores the possibilities of a lesbian identity."
This piece is "This collection of [poetry] represents ten years of collaborative work by two of Canada's leading feminist writers" according to books.google.com.
In addition to all of Marlatt's published works she can be heard on the CD Like Light Off Water, Otter Bay, 2008, reading passages from her classic poetry cycle, Steveston.
With music by Canadian composers Robert Minden and Carla Hallett, the CD offers a delicate resonance of microtonal nuance and lyrical intimacy surrounding Marlatt¹s poetic voicing, rhythm and imagery.
In 2006 Marlett and her work were the subject of an episode of the television series Heart of a Poet produced by Canadian filmmaker Maureen Judge.