Born in Pietersburg, Northern Province, he studied at Rugby, in England, and to return in South Africa became a farmer and worked as a shopkeeper in Zululand. William Plomer was a strong man, virile, manly and yet sensible. He was very jolly, simple, honest, clear-headed.

With Laurens van der Post he began an anti-racist magazine, Voorslag, which was banned. He served in the Royal Navy in WWII. He traveled in Greece, Japan and the UK, and worked as an editor at Jonathan Cape in London.

Several of his works, including his first novel, the savagely satirical Turbott Wolfe (1926), are portraits of South African life. Plomer's experiences teaching in Japan are reflected in his poems, in Paper Hoses (1929, stories), and Sado (1931, a novel). He went to England in 1929 and settled in Bloomsbury, where he was befriended by L. and W. Woolf.

His first volume of poetry, Notes for Poems (1927), was followed by several others, and his Collected Poems appeared in 1973. His poems are largely satirical and urbane; many of them, like the little piece of The Dorking Thigh (1945), are modern ballads with a macabre touch.

His edition of Kilvert's Diary appeared in 3 volumes (1938-44). He also wrote the librettos for several of Britten's operas. Although discreet about his homosexuality, Plomer accepted it. He enjoyed his first affair when he was eleven years old, with a steward on board ship.

He always felt himself to be an outsider, and thereafter most of his short-term affairs were with other outsiders. He was attracted to black South African men, to students he taught in Japan from 1926 to 1929, and in England, to working-class boys and men in uniform.

Overt homosexuality is absent from his novels and poems, but he confided to the editor of his revised, posthumously published autobiography that he expected his biographer to take his sexual orientation seriously because it was important to his work.