Douglas Oliver

Douglas Dunlop Oliver (14 September 1937 – 21 April 2000) was a poet, novelist, editor, and educator. The author of more than a dozen works, Oliver came into poetry not as an academic but through a career in journalism, notably in Cambridge, Paris, and Coventry, before attending the University of Essex in the 1970s. He received a B.A. (literature) in 1975 and an M.A. (applied linguistics) in 1982. Oliver subsequently lived in Brightlingsea, Paris, New York, and again Paris, usually working as a lecturer.

Biography

Oliver was born in 1937 in Southampton, Hampshire as the youngest of four children, and subsequently grew up near Bournemouth in the town of Branksome. His parents, Athole and Marjorie Oliver, were Scottish Presbyterians. Having left school at fifteen, Oliver did his national service as a clerk in the RAF School of Cookery and then found his way into provincial journalism. He became a journalist first in Coventry and then in Cambridge, and was a staff reporter on the Cambridge Evening News.