Douglas Dunlop Oliver was a poet, novelist, editor, and educator. The author of more than a dozen works, Oliver came into poetry not as an academic but through a career in journalism, notably in Cambridge, Paris, and Coventry, before attending the University of Essex in the 1970s. He received a B.A. (literature) in 1975 and an M.A. in 1982. Oliver subsequently lived in Brightlingsea, Paris, New York, and again Paris, usually working as a lecturer.

Diagram poems
1979
ISBN 9780900851568
Black islanders
1991
ISBN 9780947062828
Conductors Of Chaos
1996
ISBN 9780330331357
Harmless building
1973
ISBN 9780901597748
Penniless politics
1994
ISBN 9781852242695
On becoming old in early Tahiti and early Hawaii
2002
ISBN 290417152X
Poetry and narrative in performance
1989
ISBN 9780312032210
Neurobiology of Hearing
2022
ISBN 9781118981566