Alfred Edgar Coppard was an English writer, noted for his influence on the short story form, and poet. He was born, the son of a tailor and a housemaid, in Folkestone, and had little formal education. He left school at the age of nine to work as an errand boy for a Jewish trouser maker in Whitechapel during the period of the Jack-the-Ripper murders.

In the early 1920s, and still unpublished, he was in Oxford and a leading light of a literary group, the New Elizabethans, who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama. W. B. Yeats sometimes attended the meetings. At this period he met Richard Hughes and Edgell Rickword, amongst others.