Alan Rook edited the 1936 issue of New Oxford Poetry, he was one of the Cairo poets. After the war he became a wine-trader.

Studied at Magdalen College, Oxford. Saw action at Dunkirk, later invalided out of army. One of the Cairo poets. Soldiers, This Solitude (1942), These are my Comrades (1943) and We Who are Fortunate (1945).

The British Army presence in Egypt in World War II had, as a side effect, the concentration of a group of Cairo poets. There had been a noticeable literary group in Cairo before the war in North Africa broke out, including university academics. Possibly as a reflection of that, there were two strands of literary activity and publication during the years 1942-1944. There was the Personal Landscape group centred on the publication of that name, founded by Lawrence Durrell, Robin Fedden and Bernard Spencer. There was also the Salamander group, which produced a magazine and the Oasis series of anthologies. To oversimplify, the first group produced poetic reputations, while the second, founded by servicemen, broadcast appeals and collected an archive of 17,000 poems written at the period.