Career
He played guitar with the band between 2007 and 2009 before leaving to study for a doctorate at Street John"s College, Oxford and pursue a writing career. Niven"s first work of criticism, Folk Opposition, was published by Zero Books in 2011. Writing in the journal of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Niki Seth-Smith described it as a "rebuttal to. knee jerk reactions by way of careful historicisation and incisive cultural analysis", while Joe Kennedy of The Quietus described it as "one of 2011"s most incisive polemics".
His second book, a study of the Oasis album Definitely Maybe, was published in Bloomsbury"s 33⅓ series in 2014.
The Times Literary Supplement praised its "convincing modulation between a discussion of the post-Thatcher north-west England that informed Oasis"s early lyrics, and the finer points of pentatonic and mixolydian melody governing Noel Gallagher"s early songwriting". Formerly an editor-in-chief at The Oxonian Review, Niven has also written for The Guardian, The Independent, openDemocracy, Agenda, The Cambridge Quarterly, English Literary History, Oxford Poetry, Notes and Queries, The Quietus, and a number of collective blogs in addition to his own blog The Fantastic Hope.
His first collection of poetry, The Last Tape, was published in 2014, and his poem "The Beehive" provided the epigraph to Owen Hatherley"s 2012 architecture survey A New Kind of Bleak. He is currently assistant editor at New Left Review.