Andrew McNeillie was born in 1946 in North Wales and brought up there, a son of the Scottish writer Ian Niall. After an unconventional start, he read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming a publisher and editor. For a key period in his life, he was literature editor at Oxford University Press. He is the founding editor of the magazine Archipelago (2007-) and runs the Clutag Press (now in its twenty-sixth year). His memoir An Aran Keening was published by the Lilliput Press, Dublin, in 2001 and reissued in 2025. Once: A Memoir came out from Seren in 2009. Striking a Match in a Storm: New & Collected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2022. A prequel to his Aran memoir, News of the World: from Rhydamman to Inishmore appeared from Lilliput in 2025.
