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Alex Niven (born 18 February 1984, Hexham, Northumberland) is an English writer, poet, editor, and former musician.[1]
He is also currently a Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University[2] and an editor at Repeater Books.[3]
Alex Niven was born in Hexham, Northumberland.
In 2006, Niven was a founding member of the indie band Everything Everything, with friends from Queen Elizabeth High School and played guitar with the band between 2007 and 2009.[4] In 2009, he left the band to study for a doctorate[5] at St John's College, Oxford and to pursue a writing career.[citation needed]
Formerly[when?] assistant editor at New Left Review[6] and editor-in-chief at The Oxonian Review, Niven wrote for The Guardian, The Independent, openDemocracy, Agenda, The Cambridge Quarterly, English Literary History, Oxford Poetry, Notes and Queries, The Quietus, a number of collective blogs, in addition to his own blog The Fantastic Hope (2007-2017).
In 2011, Niven's first work of criticism, Folk Opposition, was published by Zero Books. The book attempted to reclaim a variety of folk culture motifs for the political left, and excoriated the "Green Tory" zeitgeist that had accompanied the ascendancy of David Cameron's Conservative Party in Britain in 2009-10. Writing in the journal of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Niki Seth-Smith described it as a "rebuttal to ... knee jerk reactions [about folk culture] by way of careful historicisation and incisive cultural analysis",[7] while Joe Kennedy of The Quietus described it as "one of 2011's most incisive polemics".[8]
In 2014, his second book, a study of the Oasis album Definitely Maybe, was published in Bloomsbury's 33⅓ series.[9] The Times Literary Supplement praised its "convincing modulation between a discussion of the post-Thatcher north-west England that informed Oasis's early lyrics, and the finer points of pentatonic and mixolydian melody governing Noel Gallagher's early songwriting".[10] LA Review of Books reviewer Rhian E. Jones judged the book a success, concluding that "Niven displays a thorough appreciation of what made Oasis good while remaining aware of their shortcomings".[11]
In 2014, his first collection of poetry, The Last Tape, was published, and his poem "The Beehive" provided the epigraph to Owen Hatherley's 2012 architecture survey A New Kind of Bleak.[12]
In 2019, his third book was published: New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture beyond the idea of England.[13]
