Malka Locker was born in 1887 in Kuty, known in Yiddish as Kitev, a town in what was then the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, now Ukraine.

[1] As she began to publish poems in the 1930s, her work received some notice from Yiddish critics.

[1][7] Subsequent collections included Du ("You") in 1932; Shtet ("Cities"), about London, in 1942; and The World Is Without a Protector: 1940–1945 in 1947.

[1][2][3][7] While she wrote primarily in Yiddish, she also published one book of poems in German, and her writing was also translated into Hebrew and French.

[1][8] Locker also produced various works of literary criticism, with a focus on French romantic and symbolic poetry, including a 1965 book on Arthur Rimbaud, a 1970 biography of Charles Baudelaire, and a 1976 biography of Paul Verlaine.