Frank Key

The Guardian's literature columnist Sam Jordison described Frank Key as one of the most prolific living writers of literary nonsense. The Guardian's David Stubbs wrote that Frank's prose "reminds of Max Ernst engravings gone Bonzo Doo-Dah". The SF critic David Langford wrote "Frank Key's lumbering machinery is like nothing since Ralph 124C 41+ and other pillars of SF's wooden age, only more decrepit. He may even conceivably be writing steampunk.". In a review of Twitching and Shattered, John Bently concluded, "It isn’t surrealism, it isn’t satire, it’s just not like anything else." Edmund Baxter, the director of programming for Resonance FM wrote "Frank Key is one of the most important writers in English today".

In 2014, Key published By Aerostat to Hooting Yard - A Frank Key Reader, a selection of 147 previously published stories, with an introductory essay by Roland Clare.

Resonance has broadcast a number of Hooting Yard special episodes. In December 2007 Key and the performance artist Germander Speedwell performed the whole of Jubilate Agno, an epic devotional poem by Christopher Smart This was the first and only time that this poem has been performed in its entirety on live radio. The entire performance was in excess of three hours.

Prior to 2006 Key's published work consisted almost entirely of short-run, self-published pamphlets. All of these original printed releases are out of print. Some of these books have become collector's items which have traded at many times their original value. In 2009 Key began re-publishing stories from his small-press releases. We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, included the short stories The Phlogiston Variations and The Book of Gnats, which were originally published in the Massacre anthology series.

Key broadcast weekly on Resonance FM, since 14 April 2004 when his show Hooting Yard on the Air was first commissioned. The programme was broadcast live from Resonance FM's studios and consisted almost entirely of Key narrating his own short stories and observations. Hooting Yard is the longest continuously running series on Resonance FM, with only the ClearSpot Show (which is technically not a series) having existed on the schedules for longer.

In 2003 Key launched "Hooting Yard", originally intended as an internet archive of his writing. In addition he released six volumes of stories which originally appeared on his web-site. These were published by Hooting Yard and made available as paperbacks and eBooks via Lulu.

In 1986, inspired by the postpunk DIY ethic, Key founded the Malice Aforethought Press with Max Décharné. Over the next few years they published a large number of short-run pamphlets.

Paul Byrne (29 January 1959 – 13 September 2019), who used the pseudonym Frank Key, was a British writer, illustrator, blogger and broadcaster best known for his self-published short-story collections and his long-running radio series Hooting Yard on the Air, which was broadcast weekly on Resonance FM from April 2004 until 2019. Key co-founded the Malice Aforethought Press with Max Décharné and published the fiction of Ellis Sharp. According to one critic, "Frank Key can probably lay claim to having written more nonsense than any other man living."