Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972) was born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland; his family moved to England in 1905. Day-Lewis attended Sherborne School before entering Wadham College, Oxford in 1923 to read Classics. At Oxford, he met W.H. Auden, who became a major influence on his early work as well as a life-long friend.

Day-Lewis took up teaching positions after leaving Oxford and began to publish poetry. Along with Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice, he became one of the influential young poets of the 1930s. He married Mary King in 1928 and they had two sons. Having a family to support, Day-Lewis began to write detective fiction under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. The success of the Blake novels encouraged Day-Lewis to become a full-time writer.

During the war, Day-Lewis worked for the Ministry of Information and, in 1946, he began to work part-time for the publishing company Chatto & Windus. In 1948, he met his second wife, the actress and broadcaster Jill Balcon, daughter of the film producer Michael Balcon: they married in 1951 and had two children, Tamasin and Daniel. The family moved to Greenwich in 1957.

C. Day-Lewis was awarded a CBE in the 1950 King's Birthday Honours and elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in early 1951. In 1964, he took up the post of the Charles Eliot Norton Chair in Poetry at Harvard and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, a role he held until his death in 1972.

Jill Balcon (1925-2009) was educated at Roedean School and studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama before embarking on a long and successful career as an actress and broadcaster. She became well-known for her radio work and was a great promoter of poetry, frequently giving live poetry readings (often alongside her husband).

Jill nurtured the legacy of C. Day-Lewis's writing after his death. She moved to a cottage in Steep near Petersfield, which she shared with the military historian Antony Brett-James until his death in 1984. Jill died in 2009 and was buried alongside her husband in Stinsford, Dorset.

Further details are given in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Note on naming: C. Day-Lewis is used consistently throughout the catalogue unless given in quotations or used in book/publication titles. C. Day-Lewis consciously did not use the name Cecil when publishing. 'C.' and 'C' have both been used in published works, so following institutional guidelines, C. has been used in this instance. With regards to the hyphen in Day-Lewis, whilst this was purposely omitted for some years, it was reinstated towards the end of his life and has therefore been retained.