Harry Ricketts is a literary scholar, biographer, essayist, reviewer, editor, poet, and teacher of creative writing. His publications include the internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010). His recent poetry collections include Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021). With historian David Kynaston, he is the co-author of Richie Benaud's Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (Bloomsbury, 2024). First Things is the first of two memoirs by Harry Ricketts, with Last Things forthcoming.