Félix Calviño was born in Galicia, on the northwest coast of Spain, and grew up on a farm. To avoid military service under General Franco, he went to England where he worked and studied English, his third language. (His other languages are Galician and Spanish.) He migrated to Australia in the later sixties, settled in Sydney and worked in the travel, restaurant, and wine industry. In 1996 he moved to Melbourne and a year later, a long-held ambition for a tertiary education was fulfilled when he was admitted to the University of Melbourne. There he studied English and Spanish as components of his Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1999, he was nominated for the Dean's List for Outstanding Achievement in second year studies.
In 2010, he was awarded the inaugural Cecilie Anne Sloane Postgraduate English Creative Writing Research Scholarship.
He graduated with a Master of Philosophy in the field of creative writing from The University of Queensland in 2012. In the same year, he was the recipient of The University of Queensland's Dean's Award for Research Higher Degree Excellence for his thesis, Time and Subjectivity in the Short Novel, and completed his PhD in 2017.
