W.D. Jackson was born in Toxteth, Liverpool, in 1947 and grew up on Merseyside. He attended Wirral Grammar School and St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he read English. In 1969 he spent a year in Florence before returning to Oxford to study for a B. Litt. on Tennyson's prosody, which he abandoned two years later. The winter of 1971–72 being a very cold one (or so it seemed), he set off for Italy again, where he met up with his future wife, a German, who was teaching at a language school based in Trento. He joined the staff of the school himself and taught there until Easter 1973. He and his wife then went to live in Munich, where their son and daughter were born and brought up. Apart from frequent visits to the UK, including a year in West Kirby (Wirral) in 1983, he has remained in Munich, working freelance as a translator and in management training. He also spent two years as a Lektor at the University of Passau.

Although his poems were not published in book form until 2002 ( Then and Now – Words in the Dark , Menard Press), the earliest of them date back to the 1970s and many had appeared in magazines such as Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The ShoP, Stand. The individual poems were gradually incorporated into a work-in-progress in three books, of which Then and Now is the overall title. The second book, From Now to Then , was published by Menard Press in 2005, while Boccaccio in Florence and Other Poems , a selection from the on-going third book ( Opus 3 ) appeared from Shearsman in 2009. The principal subject of Then and Now , which charts the odyssey of a Borgesian 'imaginary identity' through the wonders and horrors of Europe past and present, is history and individual freedom. Because the books we read are one aspect of our historical environment and can influence—insofar as we let them—our individual view of things, Then and Now consists of ‘original' poetry but also, combined and in places merged with it, translations/adaptations of major European writers (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Lessing, Heine, Rilke, and others), together with a commentary which is an integral part of the work as a whole.