Alan Gillis

Alan Gillis was an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin, then completed his MA and PhD at Queens University Belfast. He was Research Fellow at The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at QUB, then Lecturer in Modern Irish Literature at The University of Ulster, before joining the English Department at Edinburgh in 2006.

A poet and critic, Alan's most recent poetry collection The Readiness (2020) is published by Picador, and in the USA by Wake Forest University Press. This follows four poetry collections published by The Gallery Press: Scapegoat (2014), Here Comes the Night (2010), Hawks and Doves (2007) and Somebody, Somewhere (2004), which won the Strong Award for Best First Collection in Ireland. Scapegoat and Other Poems was published by Wake Forest University Press in 2016. Alan has also been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize, and for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. He was selected as a ‘Next Generation Poet’ by the Poetry Book Society in the UK in 2014.

As a critic he is author of Irish Poetry of the 1930s (2005), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012), both published by Oxford University Press. From 2010-2015 he was editor of Edinburgh Review. He has recently published essays and given conference papers on Kathleen Jamie and Ecopoetry, 'Colour in Modern Poetry', 'Satire in Modern Poetry', 'The Poetics of Place Names' and 'The Modern Irish Sonnet', as well as on the poets Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Robert Graves, Don Paterson, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Paul Durcan. He is interested in poetics generally, especially concerning the modern lyric.

He would welcome creative writing proposals, and research proposals in the area of modern and contemporary poetry.