Selwyn Pritchard was born in 1933, the third son of a Welsh carpenter. He left school at 16, was conscripted and served five years as a subaltern in The Royal Welsh Fusiliers in Jamaica, Guyana, Dortmund and Berlin. He subsequently became a teacher before getting into Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and graduating at the age of 35. He then taught philosophy for some years before moving to the Orkney Islands with his wife and three children. In 1980 they emigrated to New Zealand, then Australia. His last post was as professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Jinan University in Guanghou, People’s Republic of China. He has four grandchildren and with his wife lived on the Mornington Peninsula south of Melbourne.

He began to write poetry on leaving the United Kingdom and was awarded the Rome residency by the Literature Board of the Australia Council in 1999. Lunar Frost, translations from the Tang and Song dynasties was published by Brandl & Schlesinger, Sydney, 2000. Selwyn Pritchard died on 30 June 2005.