Andy Croft

Andy Croft (born 1956) 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, Comrade Heart, After the Party, A Creative Approach to Teaching Rhythm and Rhyme and Forty-six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing. 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 writes a regular poetry column for the Morning Star, is director of the T-Junction International Poetry festival, and he runs Smokestack Books.

Collections of poetry

 * Nowhere Special (1996)
 * Gaps Between Hills: Photographs (1996) with Mark Robinson and Dermot Blackburn
 * Great North: A Poem of the Great North Run (2001)
 * Just as Blue (2009)
 * Comrade Laughter (2004)
 * The Ghost Writer: A Novel in Verse (2008)
 * Sticky (2009)
 * Three Men on the Metro (2009) with W. N. Herbert and Paul Summers
 * 1948: A Novel in Verse (2012) with illustrations by Martin Rowson
 * Letters to Randall Swingler (Shoestring Press, 2017)

Anthologies of poetry

 * Red Sky at Night: an anthology of British socialist poetry (2003), with Adrian Mitchell
 * North by North East: the region's contemporary poetry (2006) with Cynthia Fuller
 * Not Just a Game: an anthology of sporting poems (2006) with Sue Dymoke
 * Speaking English: Poems for John Lucas (2007)
 * The Night Shift (2010) with Michael Baron and Jenny Swann
 * Everything Flows: A Celebration of the Transporter Bridge in Poetry (2012)
 * A Modern Don Juan: Cantos for these Times by Divers Hands (2015) with Nigel Thompson and George Baron

Other publications

 * smoke! an historical pageant (2004, Mudfog) - commissioned as part of the 150th anniversary of Middlesbrough.
 * Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler (2003), revised 2020 as The Years of Anger