Alex Niven

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.[2] In 2009, he left the band to study for a doctorate[3] at St John's College, Oxford and to pursue a writing career.

Formerly assistant editor at New Left Review[4] 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).

As of 2017, he was Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University[5] and an editor at Repeater Books.[6]

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]

Contributing articles

• 'Covid-19 is helping the Tories redraw the political map of England', The Guardian, 21 September 2020[14]

• The Fantastic Hope. Blog from 2007-2017
• Interview in Review 31. not dated.
• Guardian author page.
• Sukhdev Sandhu's interview-profile of Zero Books authors in The Guardian. February 17, 2012