Paul Gerard O'Prey is a British academic leader and author. In 2019 he was appointed chair of the Edward James Foundation, which owns a large rural estate in the South Downs and runs West Dean College of Arts and Conservation. Between 2004 and 2019 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Roehampton in south-west London, where he was also professor of Modern literature. Life and career O'Prey was born in Southampton, the youngest of five children. He attended St George Roman Catholic Comprehensive School until the age of 16, when he transferred to King Edward VI School, Southampton, then a grant maintained grammar school. He won a place to study English language and literature at Keble College, Oxford. He obtained his PhD from the University of Bristol, where his supervisor was Charles Tomlinson. In 1977, O'Prey left Oxford University to work for the author Robert Graves at his home in Deia, Mallorca. Professor O'Prey assisted him in various ways, most notably working with Graves' wife, Beryl (died 2003), on the creation of a major archive of Graves's papers which is now housed at St John's College, Oxford. That work led him to publish a biographical study of Graves told through his letters with other eminent writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, published in two volumes: In Broken Images (Hutchinson, 1982) and Between Moon and Moon (Hutchinson, 1984). O'Prey's edition of Graves's Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1986), published just after Graves's death in 1985, reinstated a number of poems which Graves himself had previously suppressed, including some of his youthful war poetry written during World War I. O'Prey's other books include Fleet, a collection of poems tracing the course of the lost River Fleet that flows beneath the streets of North London, published by The Melos Press in 2021, and First World War: Poems from the Front, published in 2014 by the Imperial War Museum, to coincide with the centenary of the war. It takes a new approach in focusing on a small number of poets who saw active service on the Western Front, including three women. O'Prey translated with Lucia Graves the first English translation of the Spanish nineteenth century classic novel, Los Pazos de Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazan (Penguin Classics, 1991, reissued 2013). The book was later serialised by Channel 4. O'Prey wrote the first full critical study of the novels of Graham Greene,