To Aran, I tells how a young man from north Wales found the means to give shape a youthful dream of going to live on Inis Mór, an adventure recorded in his acclaimed first memoir An Aran Keening. 

This beautiful, high-spirited story blends moments of high farce, poetry and serious social observation, as the young McNeillie – a self-described ‘quare fellow’ – pursues his dream with a kind of fatalistic abandonment. Down but not quite out, he works his way towards Aran - first as a local news reporter on £5 a week in mining towns and villages in the Amman Valley in Wales. From there, he washes up in a condemned property at Waterloo on the Mersey shore in outer Liverpool and finally, aged twenty-one, finds himself in central London and the BBC’s Radio Newsroom at Broadcasting House. 

After amassing enough money to keep him afloat on Inis Mór for a year, he sets out and, at the end of October 1968, he waved goodbye to a highly promising career, his colleagues, friends and even to his future wife: all to fulfil a dream he had when sixteen, first looking into J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands, as if it was Chapman’s Homer and he John Keats. 

'A free spirit, master storyteller and self-confessed quare fellow, Andrew McNeillie has written a tale laced with wit and passion of his trek from his native Wales via the BBC'S newsroom to a life on the Aran Islands. Every sentence of this superb book is a finely honed work of art.' - Terry Eagleton 

‘Poetic romance that rings out as a reminiscences beside a fire … An Aran Keening is a book about living, News of the World, its slim prequel, is in the dreaming.’

Andrew McNeillie was born in North Wales. He was Literature Editor at OUP for five years until May 2009 when Exeter University made him a Professor in their English Department, based at the university’s campus in Cornwall. This appointment centres round the magazine Archipelago, founded in 2007. His first collection of poems Nevermore (2000), in the Oxford Poets series from Carcanet, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His memoir An Aran Keening tells of his stay on Inis Mór, just short of a year through 1968-69. It was published in 2001 by the Lilliput Press and in 2002 in the USA by the University of Wisconsin Press. A celebratory anthology, Archipelago: A Reader (2021), was published by the Lilliput Press.