Andrew Mc Neillie

Andrew Mc Neillie

Andrew McNeillie was born at Hen Golwyn in North Wales, 12 August 1946, and educated at the primary school there, at Colwyn Bay Grammar School, and from the age of thirteen at John Bright Grammar School, Llandudno. He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, as a mature student, 1971-1973. He is currently Literature Editor at Oxford University Press.

His collection of poems Nevermore (2000), in the Oxford Poets series from Carcanet Press, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His prose memoir An Aran Keening tells of his stay on Inis Mór, just short of a year through 1968-69. It was published in 2001 by The Lilliput Press, Dublin, and in 2002 in the USA by the University of Wisconsin Press. Adam Nicolson, choosing his book of the year for 2002, in the Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘I enjoyed nothing more this year than An Aran Keening, Andrew McNeillie’s soft, sharp, funny and often heart-wrenchingly nostalgic account of the 11 months he spent on Inishmore, the biggest of the Aran Islands, in the late 1960s.’ Tim Robinson in the Irish Times wrote: ‘…McNeillie’s prose can be as pristine and effervescent as the sea’s edge on a summer beach….Aran is once again a larger place than it was.’

In 2000 McNeillie founded the Clutag Press, in Thame, Oxfordshire. It has issued limited edition works by Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, and Geoffrey Hill among others. Its literary archive is now collected exclusively by the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.