Reginald Ernest [Rex] Warner (1906-1986) was a poet, novelist, classicist and translator. While studying classics and English at Oxford, he became involved with a group of young writers including W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. After leaving Oxford he was a teacher and travelled in Egypt before publishing his first novel in 1937, The Wild Goose Chase. He was the director of the British Institute in Athens in the 1940s and then went on to teach in various American universities. Later in life he wrote many novels and works of non-fiction about Ancient Greece and Rome, including Imperial Caesar, which won the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and as well as translating numerous classical works.