Neil Astley

Neil Astley, Hon. FRSL (born 12 May 1953) is an English publisher, editor and writer. He is best known as the founder of the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books.

Life and work Astley was born in Portchester, Hampshire, and grew up in nearby Fareham. He was educated at Price's School, Fareham (1964–71), the Alliance Française, Paris (1972), and Newcastle University (1975–78 and 1979–81).

From 1972 to 1975 he worked in Leicester, Colchester, London, Paris and Australia, as a journalist, in publishing (Yale University Press), and as a press officer for Warner Brothers' magazine division and for Lyons Maid ice cream. In his essay "The Story of Bloodaxe", he recounts two early life-changing experiences, the first in France in 1972 when he "spent six months in post-'68 Paris... and was radicalised". The second was in Darwin, Australia, where he was working as a sub-editor on the Northern Territory News: "On Christmas Day, 1974, Darwin was destroyed by Cyclone Tracy. I was trapped under a collapsed house. This brush with death was enough to send me post haste to Newcastle, where I was soon working as a bus conductor while waiting to start my course."

In Newcastle upon Tyne, while studying for his degree at the university, he worked as production editor on Jon Silkin's Stand magazine for three years, helped organise poetry readings at Morden Tower, and became involved with small press editing and publishing. These included Simon Armitage, David Constantine, Maura Dooley, Ian Duhig, Helen Dunmore, Jen Hadfield, Jackie Kay, Gwyneth Lewis, Glyn Maxwell, Sean O'Brien, Jo Shapcott and Pauline Stainer, many of whom are still published by his firm. Bloodaxe has attracted poets from other commercial poetry lists, including Philip Gross and Susan Wicks from Faber, Selima Hill and Peter Reading from Chatto, R. S. Thomas from Macmillan, Ken Smith from Cape, Adrian Mitchell from Allison & Busby, Brendan Kennelly from a variety of Irish presses, and eight poets from the distinguished poetry list discontinued by Oxford University Press in 1999: Fleur Adcock, Moniza Alvi, Basil Bunting, Roy Fisher, Carole Satyamurti, Penelope Shuttle, Anne Stevenson and George Szirtes.

Philip Gross and George Szirtes went on to win the T. S. Eliot Prize with Bloodaxe collections, as did Jen Hadfield from Shetland, with her second collection. He has also sought to redress the neglect of marginalised poets, publishing important collected editions of writers such as Martin Bell (1988), James Wright (1992), Basil Bunting (2000), Barry MacSweeney (2003), Martin Carter (2006), Arun Kolatkar (2010), A. S. J. Tessimond (2010), Bernard Spencer (2011) and Richard Murphy (2013), as well as a seminal readers' edition of Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (2008) edited by Edna Longley. In 2014, his ten-year search to find and republish the poet Rosemary Tonks, who famously "disappeared" in 1979 after severing all contact with the literary world, bore fruit with her posthumously published Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems & Selected Prose.

In 1985, Astley encountered translations in an American magazine of poems by Irina Ratushinskaya, a young Russian poet then imprisoned in a Soviet prison camp for the "crime" of writing and distributing poems a judge had called "a danger to the state".

He has been a contributor to numerous radio and television programmes in Britain and Ireland, including the Today Programme, Front Row, Midweek and Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, The Verb on BBC Radio 3, University Challenge on BBC Two, GMTV's The Sunday Programme, and The Arts Show and Poetry Now on RTÉ.

In 2018 he was made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Reception As editor at Bloodaxe for more than 30 years, Astley has been credited with "revolutionising" and democratising poetry publishing in Britain. Praised for his "omnivorous inclusiveness", he has given readers "as wide a range as possible of contemporary poetry by all kinds of writers", and publishing leading poets from America, the Caribbean and Europe (including many collections and anthologies of translated poetry from France, Russia, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia in particular), alongside books by new and established poets from all parts of Britain and Ireland, the latter ranging from modernists Basil Bunting and J.H. Prynne to performance poets John Agard and Benjamin Zephaniah.

Astley has been called "the UK's leading anthologist", best known for Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times (2002), Britain's biggest selling anthology of contemporary poetry since publication, one of several books he has published aimed at broadening the readership of contemporary poetry and re-igniting the interest of readers who haven't read much poetry since school. A US edition was published in 2003 by Miramax, launched by Astley in New York as a book "for people who know they love poetry and for people who think they don't" at a reading shared with Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, Maria Tucci, Nina Cassian, Philip Levine, Glyn Maxwell, Paul Muldoon, Sharon Olds, Alice Quinn and Charles Simic. Staying Alive was a controversial book, popular with readers and booksellers. He has since published the second and third anthologies in his Staying Alive trilogy, Being Alive (2004) and Being Human (2011), which were followed by Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (2012). In 2008 he published In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, claimed to be "the world's first DVD-anthology", consisting of films on two DVDs of six hours of readings by 30 poets with all the texts included in the accompanying anthology. This was followed in 2017 by In Person: World Poets, a larger compilation featuring 14 hours of readings and features on DVD covering 59 poets from around the world, again with all the texts included in the book.

Writing In 1982 Astley received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors for a short collection of his own poems, The Speechless Act, later published by the Mandeville Press in 1984. His first book-length collection, Darwin Survivor (Peterloo Poets, 1988), was given a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. A second book of poems, Biting My Tongue, followed in 1995. He has also published two novels, The End of My Tether (2002/2003), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, and The Sheep Who Changed the World (2005).