Barry Westburg was born in Iowa, in the United States and moved to California as a child. He worked in a variety of jobs including as a postman, salesman, car park attendant, security patrolman and removalist until his appointment as a statistician on the Apollo moon rocket project in the 1960s. He completed his PhD at Cornell University and arrived in Australia in the mid-1970s to teach in the English Department at Adelaide University. As an academic, Westburg has published on Charles Dickens, including The Confessional Fictions of Charles Dickens (1977) and Edgar Allan Poe.
Westburg was a founding member of Friendly Street Poets and remained involved for 17 years, editing several collections with the group. He was Chair of the South Australian Writers' Centre and Fiction Editor with the Southern Review. In addition to writing novels, short stories and poetry, Westburg is an essayist.
