Author and professor of English, Philip Child was born in 1898 in Ontario. His studies at the Trinity College, University of Toronto were interrupted in 1917 by his service as an artillery officer during the First World War. He completed his B.A. at Trinity College, an affiliated B.A. at Christ's College, Cambridge (1921) and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. Child worked as a journalist, settlement house worker and taught at the University of British Columbia while producing several novels. He returned to Trinity College as professor in 1942, where he eventually became Chancellor's Professor of English.

Child's published works include: The Village of Souls (1933), a post-war modernist novel depicting the adaptation of the European newcomer to the Canadian wilderness; God's Sparrows (1937); The Wood of the Nightingale (1965), a narrative poem dealing with the Great War; Day of Wrath (1945) describing a Jew's fate under Hitler; Blow Wind, Come Rack (1954), a spy thriller written under the pseudonym "John Wentworth"; and Mr. Ames against Time (1948), which won both the Ryerson Fiction Award and the Governor General's Literary Award.