Lily Brett was born in a displaced persons' camp in Germany. Her Jewish parents were survivors of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. Her family moved to Melbourne in 1948, and in 1961 Brett began her literary career writing for the Australian rock magazine Go-Set.
The Auschwitz Poems (1986) received great critical acclaim for its expression of the feelings and experiences of second-generation Holocaust survivors, a theme which is prevalent throughout her writing. Her terse, short poems elliptically recreate the experience of her parents' generation in a style whose minimalism accentuates the horrors of what is being depicted. Her stories are characterised by their adept movements between horror, excesses and the exaggerated behaviour of what is reductively known as Jewish humour.
Much of Brett's writing is autobiographical or semi-autobiographical. Brett also writes intimately about her experiences with sex, body image and food. Her frank writing about her interactions with her family, particularly her relationship with her mother, led to a public rift with her sister, the author and psychologist Doris Brett, who challenged the veracity of the account. In 1991 Brett moved to New York with her second husband, the Australian painter David Rankin. Her essay collections In Full View (1997), New York (2001) and Between Mexico and Poland (2002) present her experiences as an expatriate.
