Collard was born in 1934. He obtained an
M.Litt. at the
University of Cambridge in 1963, with a critical edition of
Euripides'
Suppliants. His colleagues at the
University of Liverpool, where he was at the time, encouraged him to develop this into a full commentary, and he drafted notes on the first three hundred lines of the play in 1963–1964, before moving to the new
University of Kent at Canterbury in 1965. He completed his full two-volume edition and commentary in 1972, and it was published in 1975. In 1975, Collard was appointed Professor of Classics at
University College, Swansea, giving an inaugural lecture on "The Study of Greek Tragedy" in 1976, part of which is published in Collard's 2007 collection of essays on Euripides and tragedy. From 1986, Collard was the editor responsible for organising texts, translations and commentaries of all Euripides' plays within the "Aris and Phillips Classical Texts" series; he himself contributed a commentary on
Hecuba in 1991. In 2006, he became general editor of the whole series following the death of
Malcolm Willcock. Collard retained this role until 2016, when
Alan Sommerstein took over. The final Euripides volume, an edition of
Iphigenia at Aulis by Collard and
James Morwood, appeared in 2017. Collard is also known for his collaborations with
Martin Cropp, including two volumes of texts with translation and commentary of Euripides' fragmentary plays in the "Aris and Phillips Classical Texts" series, which appeared in 1995 and 2004, and the
Loeb Classical Library edition of the fragments of Euripides, which appeared in 2008. Collard retired from his Swansea professorship in 1996. ==Selected publications==