Jo Rippier was born in Plymouth in 1935, and educated at King's School Worcester and Emmanuel College Cambridge. He gained his Ph.D. in English Literature at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitatät, where he was a lecturer in the English Department until retiring in 1998. His previous publications include 'The Short Stories of Sean O'Faolain: A Study in Descriptive Techniques', and 'Some Postwar English Novelists', a volume of short stories, 'Goodnight, Morning, and collections of poetry', Seasons and Remembrance (1981), Beginnings, Endings (1991), Past Present (1996), Against the Stream (1999, with aquarelles by Gerhard Elsner), Late Motley (2001), Something Old, Something New (2007), Echoes and Reflections (2009), Footsteps (2011), The Silence of Snow (2013), Darkness and Light (2014), Shadows (2015) and Sights and Sounds (2017).