Douglas Kerr


Douglas Kerr is a British writer and academic who is best known for his work on Arthur Conan Doyle and George Orwell.

Life and works

Kerr was born in 1951 in Broughty Ferry, Dundee. Kerr went to school in Scotland, where he started reading Conan Doyle and never stopped. He went on to read English at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1969 before completing his PhD in comparative literature at Warwick University in 1978.
In 1979, Kerr travelled to Hong Kong, where he had obtained an appointment as a lecturer in the Department of English Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Over the next 38 years, he advanced his academic career in Hong Kong, appointed associate professor and head of the English Department in 1996, associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts in 2002, Professor of English in 2006 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts in 2014. Apart from his usual academic responsibilities, Kerr's publication record was prolific, and includes around 110 papers, articles and critiques, among them seven edited scholarly volumes, and five monographs. His main academic focus has been on the literary history of the later Victorian era and the twentieth century, the literature of empire in Asia and its aftermath, and on cultural biography. Kerr's research interests also include the literature of war and of travel, the history of literary modernism, and RGC-funded projects on Arthur Conan Doyle, George Orwell and on Joseph Conrad.
Outside of academia, Kerr contributed to Hong Kong's English-language cultural life by reviewing books for the South China Morning Post and hosting 60 programmes of a talk show, The Big Idea, for Radio Television Hong Kong on cultural, historical and scientific themes. He addressed conferences presenting keynote speeches around the world, promoting excellence in written English with his wife Elaine Ho, also a literary academic. Kerr served on the board of directors of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and became its chairman from 2009 to 2011, and participated in various BBC Radio programmes featuring the work of Wilfred Owen, George Orwell and Leonard Woolf.
In 2017, Kerr left Hong Kong and is now living and working in the UK. He is the general editor of The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle, an ambitious multi-volume project to publish scholarly editions of this author's principal writing in fiction and non-fiction, from the publisher of his alma mater, the Edinburgh University Press. Kerr is also the editor of the first volume in the edition, Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle's autobiography, which has never been properly edited. Kerr continues to be engaged with scholarly editing as well as writing about the work of Doyle, Joseph Conrad, and Orwell. His latest book, Orwell and Empire, was published 2022.

Books