Neil Young

Neil Young hails from west Belfast (1964 batch) and now lives in north-east Scotland. He worked as a labourer, kitchen-porter, stage-hand, barman and studied drama before becoming a journalist. Neil’s publications include Lagan Voices (Scryfa, 2011), The Parting Glass – 14 Sonnets (Tapsalteerie, 2016), Jimmy Cagney’s Long-Lost Kid Half-Brother (Black Light Engine Room, 2017), Shrapnel (Poetry Salzburg, 2019), and After the Riot (Nine Pens, 2021). 

In 2014, he founded The Poets’ Republic magazine as a forum for radical non-conformist poetry, and it has continued to showcase poets in English, Scots, Gaelic, and other languages, in print, online and at festival events. In 2020, he co-founded Drunk Muse Press alongside poet-editors Hugh McMillan and Jessamine O’Connor, and the press has now published books by a diversity of poets from across Scotland and internationally.

Neil staged the first Wee Gaitherin festival in Stonehaven in August 2021 to coincide with the lifting of lockdown restrictions; the festival has since expanded under the guidance of fellow directors Lesley Benzie, Cait O’Neill McCullagh and Hugh McMillan, and now operates as a charity.

He is currently working on a new collection of poems, Last Man Not Standing; and a screenplay/radio drama, Saturday Afternoons at the Rockadoo.