She moved to London while still young, where she studied at the Central School for Arts and Crafts (now part of Central St Martins College of Art and Design). She settled in Wales in the 1940s, where she painted and had poetry published by Faber and Faber (Poems (1944), Gods with stainless ears: a heroic poem (1951)).
Roberts married the poet Keidrych Rhys at Llansteffan, and lived with him in relative poverty, compared with what she was used to, at Llanybri, the village immortalized in her "Poem from Llanybri". The poem was addressed to another poet, Alun Lewis, to whom Roberts confessed to being attracted.
Lynette Roberts and Keidrych Rhys had two children (a daughter, Angharad, in April 1945, and a son, Prydein, in November 1946); they divorced in 1949.
Roberts is the dedicatee of Robert Graves's The White Goddess in its first edition, and provided much of the Welsh material used by him.
The Endeavour: Captain Cook's first voyage to Australia (1954) was a prose work. Later in life, she repudiated her work and refused to permit it to be reprinted. An edition of her collected poems was issued by Seren Press after her death but immediately withdrawn because of legal problems with the Roberts estate; a new Poems finally appeared in 2006 from Carcanet, edited by Patrick McGuinness. A volume of miscellaneous prose – diaries from her time in Llanybri, correspondence with Robert Graves, memoirs of the Sitwells and T. S. Eliot, an essay on "village dialect" and short stories – appeared in 2008. An unpublished novel, Nesta, written in 1944, is apparently lost (but see TLS article of 6 November 2009, which indicates that it has been discovered).
Conran, Anthony, 'Lynette Roberts: War Poet', Anglo-Welsh Review, 65, (1979), 50-62. Also published as pp.188-200 in The Cost of strangeness: essays on the English poets of Wales (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1982 ISBN 0850888654
Pikoulis, John, 'Awen warcheidiol: mae cerddi anarferol Lynette Roberts yn ei gosod ymhlith y goreuon o'r llenorion Eingl-Gymreig', Barn 394 (1995), 44-5
Pikoulis, John, '[Introduction to] Six Poems by Lynette Roberts', Poetry Wales, 34, no.2 (October 1998), p.3
Pikoulis, John, 'Lynette Roberts and Alun Lewis', Poetry Wales, 19, no.2, (1983) p.9-29
Pikoulis, John, 'Obituary: Lynette Roberts', The Guardian, 13 October 1995, p.117
Wheale, Nigel, 'Beyond the Trauma Stratus: Lynette Roberts' Gods with Stainless Ears and the Post-War Cultural Landscape', Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 3, (1997), 98-117
Wheale, Nigel, 'Lynette Roberts: Legend and Form in the 1940s', Critical Quarterly, 36, no. 3 (Fall 1994), 4-19
