[2] Lim was born in the state capital of Malacca City and lived with her five brothers, but was abandoned by her mother during childhood.

[3] Her first poem was published in the Malacca Times when she was ten and by the age of eleven, she had decided that she wanted to become a poet.

In 1969, at the age of twenty-four, she entered graduate school at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts under a Fulbright scholarship, and received a PhD in English and American Literature in 1973.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim is married to Charles Bazerman, a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.

She has authored several books of poems, short stories, and criticism, and serves as editor and co-editor of numerous scholarly works.