David AshfordDavid Ashford is a poet, cultural historian, publisher, and professor of English at the University of Groningen. London Underground: A Cultural Geography (LUP, 2013) was his first book. He has since published a reception history of Max Stirners impact on Modernism called Autarchies (Bloomsbury, 2017), and a cultural history of Promethean horror called A Book of Monsters (MUP, 2024). He has published three poetry chapbooks with the innovative poetry publisher Veer: Xaragmata (2013), Orcs!!! (2015) and Sedition Machines (2017). His epic-poem John Company, an experiment in Modernist open-field poetics (on the British East India Company), was published by Pamenar Press in 2021. His shorter poems have since been collected and republished as Collected Lyrics (Crater, 2025). David is currently engaged in a comparative reading and revisionist reconstruction of British mythologies, chiefly Beowulf. His work has consistently engaged with the agency of literature - its capacity for reshaping the world around us, and for producing uncanny effects. His descent into the London Underground was the beginning of this journey, and is the essential place to start for readers interested in the later work, or indeed for those wishing to learn more about the cultural history of the capital city. Read More Read Less