Clive James was born on 7 October 1939 in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, in a country that shaped his sensibility even as he spent much of his life working far from it. He held both Australian and British citizenship, a dual belonging that tracked the arc of a career carried across hemispheres. He attended Sydney Technical High School before going on to the University of Sydney, and later to Pembroke College, where his education deepened the literary range he would draw on throughout his working life.

That life took in an unusual breadth of roles. James worked as a poet, a writer, a journalist, a literary critic, a broadcaster, and a television presenter, producing work in both English and Italian. His literary criticism, in particular, demonstrated a willingness to range across cultures and centuries, and his book Cultural Amnesia gathered that wide-angle attention into a single sustained project. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a recognition of his standing in the literary world he had long inhabited. Among the honours he received were the Officer of the Order of Australia, the Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the Member of the Order of Australia, the President's Medal, and the prix Giles — a range of awards that reflected the different communities, national and intellectual, he had moved between.

James died on 24 November 2019 in Cambridge, the English city where he had lived during the final chapter of his life. He left behind work in multiple forms — poetry, criticism, journalism, and television — produced across a career that had taken him from the suburbs of Sydney to the literary culture of Britain and beyond.