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 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, Savage Survivals and, in 2018, a selected poems titled On the Margins of Great Empires. A new collection, With Feathers on Glass, appeared in 2023. He is one of the editors of Angel Exhaust and has translated a lot of modern German poetry. Over the past sixteen years he has also published a substantial amount of literary criticism: The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (2006, rev. ed. 2016); Origins of the Underground: The Occlusion of British Poetry, 1932-77, Centre and Periphery (2005, rev. ed. 2016), The Council of Heresy (2009), The Long 1950s (2012), A Poetry Boom 1990-2010 (2015), Fulfilling the Silent Rules (2018) and Nothing is being suppressed (2022).
