He was born in London and educated at Haberdashers" Aske"s School and Merton College, Oxford, where he read English.After teaching at Sherborne School he worked in publishing, including a stint on the editorial team of the Macmillan Dictionary of Art (now Oxford Art Online).
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Bird published poetry, essays and reviews. He has also written on modern British art His books include monographs on the artists Sandra Blow (2005), Bryan Wynter (2010) and Lynn Chadwick (2014), and The Street Ives Artists: A Biography of Place and Time (2008, 2nd edn 2016).
Bird has written for The Times, The Guardian, Modern Painters, Tate Etc and PN Review.
His work for radio includes contributions to the British Broadcasting Corporation arts programmes Kaleidoscope, Night Waves and The Essay, and features for British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4, including The Wreck of the Alba (2009), based on a painting by Alfred Wallis, and Lanyon"s Last Flight (2011). Bird is a visiting lecturer at Falmouth University.
