Born David Robert Sweetman in 1943, he left Dilston in 1960 to study Fine Art at King's College, Newcastle (University of Durham), as a scholarship student.
His poems were published in a number of periodicals including The Listener, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and Quarto.
This was quickly followed by biographies of Mary Renault (1994), Paul Gauguin (1995), and Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon, and the Art & Anarchy of the Fin de Siecle (1999).
He also wrote a series of cookbooks and created restaurants with his longtime companion, Thai chef Vatcharin Bhumitchitr.
Sweetman co-produced the weekly programme with Denis Boyles, an American poet and journalist, for Wanda's Factory, a London "underground" literary cooperative.