Craig Raine - Early Life

Early Life

Raine was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, the son of Norman Edward and Olive Marie Raine. His father was a boxer who twice fought for England. He grew up in a "bookless" prefab in Shildon, a town near Bishop Auckland. He won a scholarship to Barnard Castle School, which was then a direct grant school. Of his time there he has recalled that it seemed that everyone else's parents seemed to be:

accountants or surgeons or something. I couldn't say my father was an ex-boxer who did faith healing, had epileptic fits and lived off a pension. So for a while I said he was a football manager. But by the end I was inviting my friends home and they thought he was just as terrific as I did.

Raine has commented on his education: "At Barnard Castle I was taught by an absolutely remarkable English teacher, Arnold Snodgrass, a friend of W. H. Auden at Oxford . There was no question that he altered my mindset on things and made me very critical." At school he wrote "pimply Dylan Thomas" poems, some of which he sent to Philip Toynbee, then lead reviewer at The Observer.

Raine received his university education at Exeter College, University of Oxford, where he received a BA in English and later received his B.Phil. He has written of his time there that he was:

thrilled by beer at one and threepence a pint, the sexual revolution was good and I was obsessed with literature.