Born in 1920, educated at Leamington College and Downing College, Cambridge, D. J. Enright spent over twenty years teaching English at universities in Egypt, Japan, Berlin, Thailand, and Singapore. He returned to London in 1970 and later became a director of London publishers Chatto & Windus. First and foremost a poet, he published many collections in over fifty years, including Collected Poems: 1948-98 (1998), and translations from Japanese and German verse. He wrote novels for both adults and children, and revised with Madeleine Enright the English translation of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1992), while his enormous output of non-fiction includes his Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor (1969), a number of critical works, and several anthologies, among them The Oxford Book of Death (1983) and The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets (1989). Observations on life (high and low), literature, morals and manners, human or animal, are recorded in The Way of the Cat (1992), and two companion volumes to Injury Time - Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995) and Play Resumed: A Journal (1999). D. J. Enright received the Cholmondeley Award in 1974; he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1981 and appointed OBE in 1991. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1961, he was made Companion of Literature by the Society in 1998, an honour granted to no more than ten living writers at any one time. He died on the last day of 2002, after battling vigorously against cancer for seven years.