Phil Brennan is a writer drawn to stories, the stories found in football, in cities, in history, and in the quiet, complicated corners of ordinary life.
His writing career began with journalism, shaped in part by childhood summers spent in his aunt’s Manchester boarding house where a generation of young journalists were beginning their own journeys. Among them was a young James Lawton, whose presence left a lasting impression and helped kindle Phil’s lifelong fascination with words.
For many years Phil has written for The Non-League Paper, as well as serving as Editor-in-Chief of TheNonLeague Magazine. His football writing has taken him from match reports to history and biography, including A Pictorial History of Stockport County FC, written with his late friend Richard Harnwell, and The Man from Uruguay, his biography of pioneering football manager Danny Bergara.
But poetry has always offered Phil a different kind of freedom, a place to look inward as well as outward. What began with poems written for family and friends eventually became the Transient Trilogy: The Transient Curmudgeon, The Transient Mancunian and The Transient Academic.
Across the three collections, Phil writes of love and loss, memory and Manchester, history, art, politics, mortality and the strange beauty of being human. His poems are personal without being confined to the personal; rooted in one man’s experiences, yet reaching towards the universal.
At the heart of Phil’s writing is a simple fascination with life and the words we use to make sense of it. Its humour and heartbreak, its characters and contradictions, and all the moments, fleeting and otherwise, that make us who we are.
