Peter Pouncey (1937- ) is a British author and classicist. He was born in Tsingtao , China. At the end of World War II, after several dislocations and separations, his family reassembled in England, and Pouncey was educated there in boarding schools and at Oxford. He later became a classicist at Columbia University and took up the post of Dean at Columbia College before serving as President of Amherst College from 1984 to 1994. His novel Rules for Old Men Waiting won the McKitterick Prize and was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2006. Pouncey currently divides his time between New York City and northern Connecticut.