Alan Hill
Alan Hill was born in Birmingham in 1933. He read philosophy and English literature at Bristol, and subsequently worked in various branches of education in England and Scotland. He subsequently moved to Edinburgh.
Hill began seriously trying to write verse in his mid-thirties, publishing poems in magazines and journals, and a pamphlet collection, The Green Tide (Rivelin Press), appeared in 1975. He continued to write, but published very little more until he retired, when he found the momentum to put a fuller collection together: To Rocamadour (Redbeck Press, 2005).
He had encountered Japanese poetry in translation during his thirties, and found that the tanka form, adapted to an English idiom, offered a perfect vehicle for capturing ‘the quiet force of moments’. A selection of these tanka, spanning forty years of writing, was published in No Biography (HappenStance, 2010). A second tanka collection, Gerontion, on the theme of old age, was published by HappenStance in 2016.
Alan Hill died on the 1st of May, 2026.