Alan Gillis

Alan Gillis was born in Belfast in 1973 and teaches creative writing and modern and contemporary poetry at the University of Edinburgh, having lived in Scotland since 2006. Of his five poetry collections so far published, the first, Somebody, Somewhere won the Strong Award for the best first collection in Ireland, Hawks and Doves (2007), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, while the fifth, The Readiness, was published by Picador in 2020. 

Gillis co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry with Fran Brearton, which was published in 2011 by OUP, who had also published his Irish Poetry of the 1930s in 2005. He was the editor of Edinburgh Review from 2010 to 2015 and selected as a “Next Generation Poet” by the UK’s Poetry Book Society in 2014.