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.

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.

Astley is a patron of the Ledbury Poetry Festival, having previously served on its board as a trustee.

He has also been a development committee member of Cúirt International Literature Festival in Galway, Ireland, an organiser of Newcastle Literary Festival, and a director for three years of the Poetry Book Society, responsible for adding poetry in translation to the society's remit.

After graduating in 1978 with a first in English, Astley founded his poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books in Newcastle upon Tyne.

He ran it alone from home while doing postgraduate research and other jobs, until it could pay him a wage seven years later.

In 1982, he secured Bloodaxe's first annual funding from Northern Arts, later superseded by more substantial annual grant support from Arts Council England.

In 1984 he moved the press into its first office, in the Exchange Buildings on Newcastle's Quayside.

Bloodaxe is currently based in Hexham, Northumberland.

As Bloodaxe's sole editor and managing director, Astley has published more than a thousand books by more than 400 writers, and edits, produces and typesets all the press's annual output of around 30 new titles a year.

Astley's stated aim has been to achieve editorial breadth and balance by publishing what he believes to be the best of many different kinds of poetry: "The only positive discrimination I have exercised has been in favour of literary quality", which has involved commissioning several anthologies designed to redress imbalances in the availability of writing by women or minorities, including Jeni Couzyn's Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets (1985), E. A. Markham's Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain (1989), Deryn Rees-Jones's Modern Women Poets (2005), published as the companion anthology to a critical study, Consorting with Angels (2005), Jeet Thayil's Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008), Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets (ed. Jackie Kay, James Procter and Gemma Robinson, 2012), and three anthologies of emerging black and minority ethnic poets mentored through The Complete Works project established by Spread the Word, Ten: new poets (ed.

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".

At the age of 28, she had been sentenced to seven years' hard labour.

He commissioned a translator, David McDuff, to produce a book of her poetry in English, which he combined with documentary material on the poet's imprisonment obtained from Amnesty International.

It included extracts from a camp diary charting life in the "Small Zone", a special unit for women prisoners of conscience in Mordovia, where the poet was held.

Astley also published Tony Harrison's v. (1985), a book-length poem set in a vandalised cemetery in Leeds during the Miners’ Strike.

Two years after its publication, Richard Eyre’s film of the work on Channel 4 sparked a national furore, not over Harrison's left-wing politics, but over his skinhead protagonist's use of "bad language".

The resulting book, No, I'm Not Afraid, was published in May 1986.

An international campaign was mounted on her behalf, spearheaded by her own poetry, which led to her release in October 1986 on the eve of the Reykjavík Summit, after Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan had been given copies of her book by David Owen.

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.

Bloodaxe won the Northern Electric Arts Award in 1989 and the Sunday Times Small Publisher of the Year Award in 1990.

Astley discovered many of the notable poets to emerge in British poetry over the past three decades: "Astley was the first to publish some of the major players", Daisy Goodwin reported in a 1993 Guardian profile.

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.

In 1995 Astley was given an honorary DLitt by Newcastle University, where he has been a visiting fellow at its School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics since 2000.

This has involved publishing the series of annual Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures given at the university.

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.

Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra, 2010), Ten: the new wave (ed.

Karen McCarthy Woolf, 2014) and 'Ten: poets of the new generation'' (ed.

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.

He guest-edited the Spring 2015 issue of the US literary journal Ploughshares, the first all-poetry issue in its 44-year history.

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.

Karen McCarthy Woolf, 2017).

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