Geoffrey Stephen Kirk was born in December 1921 within the industrial heart of Nottingham. The family spent part of his childhood in the Hertfordshire town of Radlett before he attended Rossall School in Lancashire.
Kirk volunteered for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1941 after only completing his first year at university. He joined the Levant Schooner Flotilla which operated Allied naval vessels throughout the Aegean Sea and earned him the Distinguished Service Cross award in August 1945.
Kirk edited the fragments of philosopher Heraclitus for publication in 1954 as his first major study. He co-authored The Presocratic Philosophers with John Raven in 1959 which Hugh Lloyd-Jones described as an invaluable substitute for earlier treatments.
Kirk published Songs of Homer in 1962 presenting a nuanced view of how poems transitioned from oral to written forms. He delivered the 1968 Sather Classical Lectures entitled Myth: Its Meaning and Functions at UC Berkeley and later released a second monograph on Homer titled Homer and the Oral Tradition in 1977.
The six-volume philological commentary appeared between 1985 and 1993 during his retirement years. While he wrote the first two volumes alone, the remaining four were co-authored with Mark W. Edwards Richard Janko Nicholas Richardson and John B. Hainsworth.
He died from heart failure in March 2003 while staying at a nursing home at Rake in West Sussex. Kirk lived at Woodbridge Suffolk before moving to Bath and finally settling in Fittleworth West Sussex.