Alex Niven

Who is Alex Niven?

Alex Niven is a writer, blogger, and former musician.

Niven was a founding member of the indie band Everything Everything, with friends from Queen Elizabeth High School in Hexham, Northumberland. He played guitar with the band between 2007 and 2009 before leaving to study for a doctorate at St John's College, Oxford and pursue a writing career.

Niven's first work of criticism, Folk Opposition, was published by Zero Books in 2011. The book attempted to reclaim a variety of folk culture motifs for the political left, and excoriated the "Green Tory" zeitgeist that had accompanied the ascendancy of David Cameron's Conservative Party in Britain in 2009-10. Writing in the journal of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Niki Seth-Smith described it as a "rebuttal to ... knee jerk reactions [about folk culture] by way of careful historicisation and incisive cultural analysis", while Joe Kennedy of The Quietus described it as "one of 2011's most incisive polemics".

His second book, a study of the Oasis album Definitely Maybe, is forthcoming via Bloomsbury's 33⅓ series.