Andrew Duncan was born in 1956 and brought up in the Midlands. He worked as a labourer in England and Germany after leaving school, and subsequently as a project planner with a telecoms manufacturer (1978-87), and as a programmer for the Stock Exchange (1988-91). He now works in the Civil Service and is based in Nottingham. He has been publishing poetry since his Cambridge days in the late 70s, including Threads of Iron, Anxiety Before Entering a Room, Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures and Savage Survivals. He is one of the editors of Angel Exhaust and has translated a lot of modern German poetry. Over the past 10-15 years he has also published a good deal of literary criticism, above all The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (2nd edition published by Shearsman Books in 2016, uniform with this volume); Origins of the Underground: The Occlusion of British Poetry, 1932-77 (Salt), as well as three further volumes from Shearsman Books: The Council of Heresy (2009), The Long 1950s (2012) and A Poetry Boom 1990-2010 (2015).
