Henry Woodd Nevinson was born on October 11, 1856, in Leicester, England.

He was a British journalist, author, and philanthropist. He studied at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford. He worked as a missionary at Toynbee Hall in London's East End and spent some time in Jena studying German culture. In the 1880s, Nevinson became a socialist and joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1889. In 1897, he became the Daily Chronicle's correspondent in the Greco-Turkish War. He was known for his reporting on the Second Boer War (1899-1902), slavery in Angola (1904–1905), and on India for the Manchester Guardian. In 1914, he co-founded the Friends' Ambulance Unit. He was also a suffragist, one of the founders of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1907. During World War I, he was a war correspondent on the Western Front and in the Dardanelles.

In 1884, he married Margaret Wynne Jones (1858–1932), and in 1933, he remarried Evelyn Jane Sharp (1869–1955). His son Christopher R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946) was an English painter, etcher and lithographer. Nevinson died on November 9, 1941, in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, England.