Sir Stephen Spender (1909-1995), poet, playwright, author and critic, began his literary career as one of the 'Auden Group' (comprising Oxford poets Spender, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis and the Cambridge-educated novelist Christopher Isherwood). He spent time in Germany alongside Isherwood, and was briefly involved in the Spanish Civil War. In December 1936 he married Inez Maria Pearn (1914–1977), a modern languages postgraduate at Oxford. They divorced by 1941 and Spender married Natasha Litvin (1919-2010), a concert pianist, with whom he had two children.

Disqualified (by health and age) from fighting in World War II, he became a fireman in London with the Auxiliary Fire Service while also editing the literary magazine Horizon. After the war, Spender earned a living chiefly as a lecturer and university professor in America, and as literary editor of the journal Encounter. He continued to publish poetry, drama, novels, short stories, essays and literary criticism as well as autobiographical works including World Within World (1951).

Alongside Spender's writing career, he campaigned against censorship and the persecution of writers, founding the Writers and Scholars Educational Trust, which became Index on Censorship. He was knighted in 1983.

See also the Dictionary of National Biography entry for Spender, and Stephen Spender, the Authorized Biography by John Sutherland (2005).