Printed in a limited edition pamphlet with William Blake artwork and black and white photographs, here is Niall McDevitt’s autobiography and mission statement in the form of an 8000-word long interview conducted over email with the scholar Caroline Anjali Ritchie in April-May, 2021. Extracts below:

‘The humble literary walk is a kind of artform. It’s a medium for edutainment, dissemination of radical ideas, sociability, and for encountering the unexpected. One Christopher Marlowe walk began with his line ’Birds of the air will tell of murders past’, and ended with an avian reconstruction of Marlowe’s murder. Three crows attacked and all but killed a magpie just as we arrived at the scene of the crime in Deptford Strand.’

‘As a secondary schoolboy I performed the accustomed hop, skip and jump from The Doors to Aldous Huxley to William Blake. Irish Catholicism didn't stand a chance.’

‘My personal kabbala of Shakespeare/Blake/Rimbaud/Yeats is really about honouring revolutionary poets from the humanist period, the romantic period, the symbolist period and the modernist period. (Yeats was an Irish nationalist who was inspired by Blake’s anti-imperial poems to write politicised verse for page and stage).’

In London when I first took to a garret, I thought I was the last of the bohemians. Such is an immigrant’s lot. You don’t know anything or anyone. I was an aesthetic migrant, not an economic migrant. In my Dublin, it didn’t feel there was a bona fide underground or counterculture. I mean apart from the Virgin Prunes. In London, the underground was as vast as Hades. In Ireland I had seen many of the poets, but did not think it possible to join their ranks. They seemed too robed, too druidic.

Before the Roman conquest, London was one of dozens of Celtic settlements throughout Ireland, Britain and Europe named after this god, Lugh/Lleu/Lud/Lugus. Cities such as Carlisle (Caer Lleu), Lyons (Lugdunum), Leyden etc. (even Luton for Chrissakes!) are all named after him.