Born in Hope Hospital, Salford, Lancashire, the first son of an Anglican curate and geography teacher, Peter Robinson spent his first three years in Pendlebury and Davyhulme. Taken to Litherland in 1956, he grew up, with the exception of five years spent in Wigan (1962-1967), in poor urban parishes of north and south Liverpool. Robinson graduated from the University of York in 1974. In the 1970s he edited the poetry magazine "Perfect Bound". He helped organize several international Cambridge Poetry Festivals between 1977 and 1985, and was festival coordinator in 1979. He was awarded a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1981 for a thesis on the poetry of Donald Davie, Roy Fisher and Charles Tomlinson. Among the most decisive events for his creative life, a sexual assault in Italy upon his girlfriend in 1975 — which he witnessed at gunpoint — formed the material for some of the poems in "This Other Life" (1988) and provided the plot outline for a novel called "September in the Rain" published in September 2016.