Douglas Kerr is from Scotland and was educated at the universities of Cambridge and Warwick. He has worked for most of his life at the University of Hong Kong, where he is Professor in the School of English.
His publications include Wilfred Owen’s Voices (Clarendon Press, 1993) George Orwell (Writers and their Work series, 2003), and A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s co-edited with Julia Kuehn (Hong Kong University Press, 2007), besides essays on Conrad, Kipling, Leonard Woolf, Auden and Isherwood, Graham Greene etc.
He is a founding co-editor of Critical Zone: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge.
His new book, Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing, (Hong Kong University Press, to be published in the summer of 2008), deals with the history of representations of Eastern people and places from the time of Kipling to the postcolonial period.