Robin Anthony Herschel Waterfield was born in England in 1952, and received a traditional British private education, which at least instilled in him a lifelong love for the Classics, and especially Greek. This love blossomed in the congenial environment of Manchester University (1971-4), where he took the Classics Prizes in 1972 and 1973, and gained first-class honours in 1974. But then, determined to become a university lecturer, he abandoned Manchester for a PhD in Cambridge. But before completing his dissertation (on Plato’s Philebus), he accepted a one-year post in the Classics department at Newcastle University. This was followed by three one-year posts at St Andrews University, in the Department of Greek. At this point, in 1982, Mrs Thatcher’s government decided there were too many lecturers in ‘unimportant’ subjects such as Classics, and he was made redundant.

He crept into Penguin Books through a side door (they were in the process of publishing his first book) and became a copy-editor for a couple of years, before leaving in 1984 to pursue a career as a writer (sustained for a while by continuing to work as a freelance copy-editor). He was tempted back to Penguin in 1988 to commission for the newly acquired Arkana list (and subsequently business books and health books too), but the pull of writing again proved too strong, and he left early in 1991, while remaining as a consultant to Penguin until the very end of 1999, for Penguin Classics and for Arkana. He has also been the advisory editor for Puffin Gamebooks, a biographical copy-writer, and a blurb-writer.

He was an invited lecturer at Williams College, Massachusetts, in January and February 2000, and Writer in Residence at the University of Sussex in the academic year 2001-2; and between 2002 and 2005 he taught academic writing skills at several universities and colleges in London and south-east England. This work was paid for by the Royal Literary Fund, and he was also a member of the RLF’s Higher Education Panel, whose purpose was to address the crisis in writing and literacy skills currently afflicting British universities. But in 2005 he chose to leave Britain. He now lives with his wife Kathryn in the rural far south of Greece, where as well as writing he has a small olive farm, producing organic olive oil. Late in 2020, a few weeks before Brexit, he gained Greek citizenship.

Robin is co-editor, with Richard Alston, of the Oxford University Press series ‘Ancient Warfare and Civilization’. He is on the Board of Advisors of the Plato's Academy Centre. He has given invited lectures both in the UK and in the States, has appeared on radio a number of times (chiefly in the context of publicizing a book), on various blogs, podcasts, and webinars, and in the expanded version of BBC2's 2010 production 'Ancient Worlds'. He has written over 350 book reviews or notices for academic journals. Apart from 30 retellings of other people’s books (for children, talking books, and the EFL market), and about the same number of miscellaneous articles and introductions, his main publications are listed in the relevant sections of this website.