In Newcastle upon Tyne, while studying for his degree at the university, he worked as production editor on Jon Silkin's Stand magazine for three years, helped organise poetry readings at Morden Tower, and became involved with small press editing and publishing.
As Bloodaxe's sole editor and managing director, Astley has published more than a thousand books by more than 400 writers, and edits, produces and typesets all the press's annual output of around 30 new titles a year.
[6] These included Simon Armitage, David Constantine, Maura Dooley, Ian Duhig, Helen Dunmore, Jen Hadfield, Jackie Kay, Gwyneth Lewis, Glyn Maxwell, Sean O'Brien, Jo Shapcott and Pauline Stainer, many of whom are still published by his firm.
Bloodaxe has attracted poets from other commercial poetry lists, including Philip Gross and Susan Wicks from Faber, Selima Hill and Peter Reading from Chatto, R. S. Thomas from Macmillan, Ken Smith from Cape, Adrian Mitchell from Allison & Busby, Brendan Kennelly from a variety of Irish presses, and eight poets from the distinguished poetry list discontinued by Oxford University Press in 1999: Fleur Adcock, Moniza Alvi, Basil Bunting, Roy Fisher, Carole Satyamurti, Penelope Shuttle, Anne Stevenson and George Szirtes.
[7] In 2014, his ten-year search to find and republish the poet Rosemary Tonks, who famously "disappeared" in 1979 after severing all contact with the literary world,[8] bore fruit with her posthumously published Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems & Selected Prose.
He commissioned a translator, David McDuff, to produce a book of her poetry in English, which he combined with documentary material on the poet's imprisonment obtained from Amnesty International.
It included extracts from a camp diary charting life in the "Small Zone", a special unit for women prisoners of conscience in Mordovia, where the poet was held.
An international campaign was mounted on her behalf, spearheaded by her own poetry, which led to her release in October 1986 on the eve of the Reykjavík Summit, after Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan had been given copies of her book by David Owen.
Two years after its publication, Richard Eyre's film of the work on Channel 4 sparked a national furore, not over Harrison's left-wing politics, but over his skinhead protagonist's use of "bad language".
[3] Astley's response was to assemble a new edition of v. (1989) including the poem with documentation of the newspaper and other media coverage which became a set text on cultural studies courses.
This involved overturning an earlier bias favouring Oxbridge-educated male writers from south-east England,[11] and publishing leading poets from America, the Caribbean and Europe (including many collections and anthologies of translated poetry from France, Russia, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia in particular), alongside books by new and established poets from all parts of Britain and Ireland, the latter ranging from modernists Basil Bunting and J.H.
[18] In 1982 Astley received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors for a short collection of his own poems, The Speechless Act, later published by the Mandeville Press in 1984.