Julian Croft grew up in Newcastle, NSW, where he was born in 1941. After graduating from the university there, he spent the late 1960s in Europe and Africa, and taught at the University of Sierra Leone, 1968–70. Since then he has lived in Armidale in northern NSW, where he was a teacher of literature at the University of New England until recently. He has been publishing poems since 1962. His first collection, Breakfasts in Shanghai (A&R, 1984) was the Asia/Pacific winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. A&R published his novel, Their Solitary Way, in 1985, and a second book of poems, Confessions of a Corinthian, in 1991.