Andrew McNeillie was born in North Wales in 1946 and read English at Magdalen
College, Oxford. He is the Literature Editor at Oxford University Press. His
collection of poems Nevermore (2000), in the Oxford Poets series from Carcanet, 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 (Lilliput Press Ltd, Dublin, 2001/ University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). A new collection of poems Now, Then came out in 2002 from Oxford/Carcanet. His next collection is due from Carcanet in 2005.
 

Praise for Andrew McNeillie 'The wind blows hard and the sea crashes through his poems, brilliant and evocative of the littoral... [a] multifarious collection. Striking a Match in a Storm demonstrates an outstanding nature writer at the helm of these poems.' 

Dan McCarthy, Irish Examiner 

'A living poetic language flows, easy and slangy, the occasional poems which punctuate the later part of the collection are vitalized and real, among them elegies that remember mourning his father's death, and other deaths, which ring true, urged into being by poetry itself.'
Gillian Clarke 'The finest poems here are witty and elegiac, comforting and cajoling and speak of pervading human concerns with a rare lyrical ease and quiet authority. McNeillie's special gift is for providing the pleasure that comes from recognition: we can see ourselves in his poems. The book carries an epigram from Wordsworth, and there is a Wordsworthian sense of audience and connection in this collection.'

Times Literary Supplement

'There is some extraordinary virtuosity here - in one poem, he finds 33 half-rhymes for 'envy'.
John Greening, Country Life