Gael Turnbull was born in Scotland in 1928 and raised and educated in Winnipeg, Cambridge and Philadelphia. He received a BA from Cambridge (England) in 1948 and an MD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951. He worked as a general practitioner and anaesthetist in Canada, the USA and England until 1989. He was an important precursor of the British Poetry Revival. In the early 1990s, Turnbull returned to Edinburgh. He lived there until his death in 2004.