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.
[1] 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.
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.
Significantly, it was there that he befriended the American poets Ted Berrigan (1934—1983) and Alice Notley.