William Cliff was born in 1940 in the small Walloon town of Gembloux. He studied Spanish and Catalan at the university of Namur (Namen). Becoming acquainted with the work of the Catalan poet Gabriel Ferrater (1922–72), of whom he was later to translate two collections, was of crucial importance to him. In Ferrater he discovered the possibility of combining a modern, colloquial idiom with strict, classical verse forms and, above all, of remaining close to his own experience – of striving for a veracity that is averse to – and often likes to mock – our bourgeois and poetical norms of respectability.