Kevin Crossley-Holland emerged as a poet in the early 1960s. After coming down from Oxford, where he earned a B.A. with honors in 1962, he was associated with the Group--a loose association of writers that included Martin Bell, Peter Porter, George Macbeth, Peter Redgrove, Alan Brown-john, Keith Harrison, and Edward Lucie-Smith, who met regularly to discuss one another's work, but were not united by any common conception of what poetry should be or any common theme. Crossley-Holland joined too late to appear in A Group Anthology (1963), but, as he said recently, the "exposure to serious and warm critical discussions between friends was invaluable ... it made me ... much more self-critical...."

Kevin Crossley-Holland was born in Mursley in Buckinghamshire. He attended Bryanston School and went on to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he studied English language and literature. He has two sons, Kieran and Dominic. His wife is the former...