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.

Oliver was born in 1937 in Southampton, Hampshire as the youngest of three 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.

In 1962 he married Janet Hughes. They had two daughters, Kate and Bonamy, and a son, Tom. They moved to Cambridge in about 1968. It was there that Oliver formed some ties with a group of poets with connections to The English Intelligencer and the Ferry and Grosseteste presses: part of the group vaguely associated with J. H. Prynne which today is acknowledged as an important epicenter of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. These poets subsequently became known as the Cambridge poets. At this time, Oliver's own poems began to be published.

In 1970, the family moved to Paris where Oliver worked for Agence France-Presse. Upon his return to England, Oliver took his place as a student at Essex University, which had also become a gathering place for poets. Significantly, it was there that he befriended the American poets Ted Berrigan (1934—1983) and Alice Notley.

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