Douglas Kerr

Douglas Kerr is Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong, where he has taught for more than thirty years. He was born in Dundee, and went to school in Scotland and to university in England, studying at the universities of Cambridge and Warwick. His first book was about the English soldier-poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed on the Western Front in the last week of the Great War. He published a study of the great political writer George Orwell in 2003, in the series Writers and their Work. Long residence in colonial and then in postcolonial Hong Kong was behind Eastern Figures, which deals with the subjects of Orient and Empire in British Writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has had a lifelong enthusiasm for Arthur Conan Doyle and describes his most recent work as a cultural biography of Conan Doyle and the first comprehensive study of his writing.