Ken Bradshaw was educated at All Souls School in Charters Towers. From 1937 to 1941 he studied engineering at the University of Queensland (St John's College). Though doing a technical course, Bradshaw was also interested in art, music, drama and poetry, and he was actively involved in university life. He became secretary, and later president, of the Student Union, was a member of the University Dramatic Society, and contributed to the university papers Semper Floreat and Galmahra, including being one of the sub-editors for Galmahra in 1937 and 1938.
During the Second World War, in 1941, Bradshaw won a Rhodes Scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at Oxford, but as this scholarship couldn't be taken up during the war, he joined the AIF. He was taken prisoner at El Alamein in 1942 and spent the rest of the war in POW camps in Italy and Germany. When the war was over he went to Oxford and took up his scholarship. After his return to Australia in 1949, he started working for the Aeronautical Research Laboratories, then worked for APM (now Amcor) from 1951 to 1971, and for Thomas Nelson Holdings UK until 1975. From 1975 to 1990 he lectured at the Swinburne Institute of Technology. Bradshaw was also a founding member of and lecturer at the University of the Third Age (U3A), City of Melbourne, from 1984 on.
Bradshaw wrote several volumes of poetry and, in the mid-1990s, an autobiographical work, Instead of a Life (all self-published). His poetry has a strain of anti-violence and, in its later stages, is directly anti-war.
