Robyn Bolam (formerly Marion Lomax) was born in 1953 in Newcastle, and grew up in Northumberland. She gained her doctorate from the University of York in 1983, and her study of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was published by CUP in 1987. She has edited four plays by John Ford (OUP, 1995) and The Rover by Aphra Behn (New Mermaids, 1995), and is now Professor of English at St Mary's University College, Strawberry Hill, where she has taught since 1987. In 1981 she received a Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and won first prize in the Cheltenham Festival poetry competition. Her libretto for the opera Beyond Men and Dreams (composer Bennett Hogg) was performed by the Royal Opera House Garden Venture in 1991. In 1993 she held a Hawthornden International Fellowship. She has published three books of poems with Bloodaxe, The Peepshow Girl (1989) and Raiding the Borders (1996), both under her former name of Marion Lomax and New Wings: Poems 1977-2007 (2007), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her anthology Eliza's Babes: Four Centuries of Women's Poetry in English was published by Bloodaxe in 2003.

Booth was born in Lancashire, but was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, where he first attended Kowloon Junior School, the Peak School then King George V School, and left in 1964.

He made his name as a poet and as a publisher, producing elegant volumes by British and American poets, including slim volumes of work by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His own books of verse include The Knotting Sequence (1977), named for the village in which Booth was living at the time. The book features a series of lyrics in which he seeks links between the present and the Saxon past, and the man called Knot who gave his name to the village. Booth also accumulated a library of contemporary verse, which allowed him to produce anthologies and lectures.

In the late 1970s Booth turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985. The book is based on what he heard from a man he met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War.

Booth was a veteran traveller who retained an enthusiasm for flying, also expressed in his poems, such as "Kent Says" and In Killing the Moscs. His interest in observing and studying wildlife resulted in a book about Jim Corbett, a big-game hunter and expert on man-eating tigers.

Many of Booth's works were linked to the British imperial past in China, Hong Kong and Central Asia. Booth was also fond of the United States, where he had many poet friends, and of Italy, which features in many of his later poems and in his novel A Very Private Gentleman (1990). These interests form a thread through his later novels, travel books and biographies.

Booth's novel Industry Of Souls was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize.

Booth died of cancer in Devon in 2004, shortly after completing Gweilo, a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood written for his own children.

The 2010 film The American, starring George Clooney, was based on his novel A Very Private Gentleman.