Alex Niven’s project is to reinject a sense of belief back into British life. In his seven books on regionalism, music, and poetry written since Folk Opposition (2011), Niven has championed the radical North of England — and more broadly, of radical “outer Britain” in general — as a plausible counterweight to a country centralized more than ever before around London and Westminster, the twin centers of financial and governmental power. Within those books, especially New Model Island (2018), are particular plans and ideas, but treating his books like they’re simply policy papers makes no sense. What makes them exciting is that they’re mythic — and about much more than the issues of the day.

Though he is quiet and restrained in person, Niven writes in what an eighteenth-century critic would call “the grand manner.” What makes him one of the British left’s most valuable writers is that he is never embarrassed. Much English writing today, including on the Left, is cliquey and priggish — terrified of being caught out. Niven’s work is as loud and as achingly sincere as a lay preacher in some rusty methodist chapel. It is motivated by an unfashionable intensity of belief. That belief is socialism to be sure — and something more traditionally devout, too (Niven is a practicing Catholic). But it is also a belief in what literature and culture more generally can accomplish. W. H. Auden, an upper-middle-class Midlander and disenchanted former leftist, once argued that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Niven is constantly trying to use poetry to make things happen.

His latest, The North Will Rise Again (2023), appears at first as his most conventional book, and is his first with a mainstream publisher. It presents itself as a straight-up polemic for Northern modernism, a sort of rallying cry for some putative utopian version of Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham to pick up. So, unlike in New Model Island, there is no moment in which Niven finds himself in Dorset and suddenly breaks into verse.