[2] Hobsbaum was born into a Polish Jewish family in London, and brought up in Bradford, Yorkshire, where he attended Belle Vue Boys' Grammar School.
After Cambridge, he worked as a school teacher in London from 1955 to 1959, when he moved to Sheffield to study for a PhD under William Empson.
Hobsbaum's most direct impact on literature was as the animating force behind The Group, a sequence of writing workshops in Cambridge, London, Belfast and Glasgow, in turn.
The Cambridge Group was initially concerned with the oral performance of poetry, but soon turned into an exercise in practical criticism and mutual support for a network of poets.
In Glasgow, Hobsbaum became once again the nucleus of a group of new and distinctive authors, including Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Aonghas MacNeacail and Jeff Torrington.