Andy Croft


Andy Croft is an English writer, editor, poet and publisher based in North East England. His books include Red Letter Days, a history of British political fiction of the
1930s. Other books written or edited by Croft include Out of the Old Earth, A Weapon in the Struggle, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler, After the Party, A Creative Approach to Teaching Rhythm and Rhyme, ''Forty-six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing, Bare Freedom and The Privatisation of Poetry. He has written seven novels and 42 books for teenagers, mostly about football.
Writing residencies include the Hartlepool Headland, the Great North Run, the Southwell Poetry Festival, the Combe Down Stone Mines Project, HMP Holme House and HMP South Yorkshire. He has given many poetry readings, including readings in Paris, Moscow, Potsdam, Sofia, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, New York and London's Poetry International. He ran the Writearound Community Writing Festival in Cleveland, the T-junction International Poetry Festival in Middlesbrough, the Ripon Poetry Festival and Smokestack Books. From 2004-2022 he was poetry editor at the Morning Star''.

Collections of poetry

  • Nowhere Special
  • Gaps Between Hills: Photographs with Mark Robinson and Dermot Blackburn
  • Great North: A Poem of the Great North Run
  • Just as Blue
  • Comrade Laughter
  • The Ghost Writer: A Novel in Verse
  • Sticky
  • Three Men on the Metro ''with W. N. Herbert and Paul Summers
  • 1948: A Novel in Verse with illustrations by Martin Rowson
  • Letters to Randall Swingler
  • The Sailors of Ulm''

    Anthologies of poetry

  • Red Sky at Night: an anthology of British socialist poetry, with Adrian Mitchell
  • North by North East: the region's contemporary poetry ''with Cynthia Fuller
  • Not Just a Game: an anthology of sporting poems with Sue Dymoke
  • Speaking English: Poems for John Lucas
  • The Night Shift with Michael Baron and Jenny Swann
  • Everything Flows: A Celebration of the Transporter Bridge in Poetry
  • A Modern Don Juan: Cantos for these Times by Divers Hands with Nigel Thompson
  • Release the Sausages! Poems for Kier Starmer''

    Other publications

  • smoke! an historical pageant - commissioned as part of the 150th anniversary of Middlesbrough.
  • Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler, revised 2020 as