Lithium–sulfur batteries (LSBs) with a high energy density have been regarded as a promising energy storage device to harness unstable but clean energy from wind, tide, solar cells, and so on. However, LSBs still suffer from the disadvantages of the notorious shuttle effect of polysulfides and low sulfur utilization, which greatly hider their final commercialization. Biomasses represent green, abundant and renewable resources for the production of carbon materials to address the aforementioned issues by taking advantages of their intrinsic hierarchical porous structures and heteroatom-doping sites, which could attribute to the strong physical and chemical adsorptions as well as excellent catalytic performances of LSBs. Therefore, many efforts have been devoted to improving the performances of biomass-derived carbons from the aspects of exploring new biomass resources, optimizing the pyrolysis method, developing effective modification strategies, or achieving further understanding about their working principles in LSBs. This review firstly introduces the structures and working principles of LSBs and then summarizes recent developments in research on carbon materials employed in LSBs. Particularly, this review focuses on recent progresses in the design, preparation and application of biomass-derived carbons as host or interlayer materials in LSBs. Moreover, outlooks on the future research of LSBs based on biomass-derived carbons are discussed.