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David Holbrook (b. 1923) was born in Norwich, England, to Kenneth Redvers and Elsie Grimmer Holbrook, he was educated at local primary and grammar schools and went from there on a scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied for a year (1941) under the prominent English critic, F.R. Leavis . He served in the army from 1942 to 1945 as a lieutenant tank troop leader, a mines and explosives officer, and an intelligence officer with the East Riding Yeomanry. His landing in France on D Day with a waterproofed tanks regiment is vividly and powerfully described in his first novel, Flesh Wounds (1966). He returned to Cambridge in 1945 and completed his honors B.A. in English in 1947. Between graduation and the publication of his first book of poems, he was assistant editor of Our Time (1947), taught Workers' Educational Association (W.E.A.) classes, and helped to launch the Use of English magazine (1948). On 23 April 1949 he married Margot Davies-Jones. They have two daughters and two sons. He left London in 1949 and taught secondary modern school in Felixstowe, Suffolk, tutored for the W.E.A. in East Anglia and Leicestershire, and was a tutor at Cambridgeshire Village College in Bassingbourn from 1954 to 1961. His first volume of verse Imaginings (1960) emerges naturally from this active period of teaching and family living, in which he also edited anthologies such as Children's Games (1957) and Iron, Honey and Gold (1961), and wrote a work on education, English for Maturity (1961).
-- from Ferns, John. "David (Kenneth) Holbrook." Poets of Great Britain and Ireland Since 1960. Ed. Vincent B. Sherry. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 40. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. Literature Resource Center. Gale. San Francisco Public Library. 23 Nov. 2009 .