Alliott Alan Whitfeld Wood was born in Sydney on October 6, 1914. He was the son of George Arnold Wood, a brilliant English-born Australian history professor, and a nephew of Hubert Edwin Whitfeld, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Western Australia. George Wood is best remembered for having the extreme courage to be an ardent opponent of British tactics in the Boer War, publicly protesting against "a policy that is bringing everlasting infamy upon the English name".
Alan Wood graduated in arts from Sydney University and was a member of the Australian Christian Student Movement. After attending a movement conference at St Peter's College in Adelaide in late August 1935, he left for England, where he studied Modern Greats at Oxford University and became president of the Oxford Union in 1938. At the time he used a Corona 3 portable typewriter. As president of the union he succeeded Philip Toynbee and was succeeded by future British Prime Minister Edward Heath.
After the war Wood became head of the Overseas Food Corporation's Information Division, but left after exposing lies about the Tanganyika groundnut scheme (about which he wrote a book, The Groundnut Affair, in 1950). In September 1946, he married fellow journalist Winifred Mary Seaton, with whom he wrote books, including Islands in Danger (1955), a history of the German occupation of the Channel Islands. On his own Wood wrote biographies of philosopher Bertrand Russell, filmmaker J. Arthur Rank and newspaper owner Lord Beaverbrook, as well as Flying Visits, a 1956 work critical of Australia. Alan Wood died of an incurable brain disorder at the Atkinson Morley Hospital in London on October 27, 1957, aged just 43. 
He lost a leg after getting during Operation Varsity, on 24 March 1945.