English war poet.

Owen's family moved to Birkenhead (Liverpool) when he was 4 years old. At school he displayed a keen interest in the arts and began his earliest experiments in poetry aged 17.

Owen was teaching English in France when war broke out. In September 1915 he returned to England to enlist. He joined the Manchester Regiment and in January 1917 was posted to France. Having been injured and caught in a shell explosion, he was diagnosed as having shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart military hospital, near Edinburgh, in June.

At the hospital Owen met Siegfried Sassoon. Himself a poet, Sassoon encouraged Owen to write. This was an extremely creative period during which Owen wrote many of his best-known poems, including Anthem for Doomed Youth and Dulce et Decorum est.

Owen was declared fit for duty in August 1918 and returned to the front. On 4 November, he was caught in a German machine-gun attack and killed. The news reached his parents on 11 November 1918, the day of the armistice.

Owen's poems, written during the First World War, powerfully evoke the horror and pity of war.