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Alex Niven (born 18 February 1984, Hexham, Northumberland) is a British writer, poet, editor, academic and musician. he is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the editor of Tribune.
Niven worked as an assistant editor at New Left Review from 2014 to 2015 and in 2014 helped to start the publisher Repeater Books, responsible for publishing books by Mark Fisher, Dawn Foster, Grace Blakeley and others. He has contributed journalism and reviews to The Guardian, The New York Times, Pitchfork, The Face, New Statesman, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin and Tribune, and has been described by the writer Ian Sansom as "one of the UK's rather more interesting younger cultural critics".
Niven'
/ref> Left-wing populism and the cultural heritage of Northern England (especially North East England).
In 2014, his second book, a study of the Oasis album Definitely Maybe, was published in Bloomsbury Publishing's 33⅓ series. Summarising the book in Pitchfork, Stephen M. Deusner wrote that Niven "makes his arguments with such insight that for a while I did come to think of Oasis as a bunch of leftist revolutionaries reconceiving pop music as a vehicle for working-class liberation."
In 2019, his third book was published: New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England. Tom Whyman described it in Jacobin as "suffused with a deep love of the North East", while Tim Burrows of The Guardian called it "a rare thing: a critique that provides practical suggestions about how to change things – specifically England – for the better."
In 2023, his book on Northern England, The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands, was published by Bloomsbury Publishing. It was described by Andy Burnham as a "great book", though Stuart Maconie, writing in New Statesman, was critical of Niven's judgement that descriptions of Diane Abbott as "disgusting" and "stupid" by voters during the 2019 United Kingdom general election were influenced by racial prejudice. Maconie argued that "it is simply not good enough to slander anyone ... unimpressed by Diane Abbott as a racist".
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