Lucija Berzins was born of Latvian nationality and grew up in the academic environment of the university city of Tartu, where her father was a Professor of Greek antiquities. After gaining an MA in English Philology, she lectured in English Language and Literature at the University of Latvia from 1939 until her departure from Latvia in 1944. She spent five years in Germany, where she taught at the Baltic University in Pinneburg. In Australia, she taught English and history at various secondary schools in Sydney and at the Sydney Technical College. She began writing novels when she retired.
Although her mother was English and she was brought up bilingually, she chose, having been influenced by the brief period of Latvian independence, to write primarily in Latvian. She received: the 1976 Latvian Fund of Culture International Award for furthering the teaching of Latvian in ethnic schools, the 1977 Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal for promoting the study of ethnic languages at Saturday schools in NSW, the 1978 Ethnic Book Fair Languages Galore Award for her unpublished novel, Through the Eyes of a Stranger (in English and Latvian), and the 1986 General Gopper Award and the 1988 Latvian Global Award for prose writings. Her writing included autobiography, editing, fiction and translation.
