Alan Gillis is an Irish poet who lives in Scotland.

 

Born in 1973, Alan is from Newtownards, County Down, in Northern Ireland. His father worked in Belfast Harbour and his mother was a nurse. 

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After studying at Trinity College Dublin and Queens University Belfast, Alan became the first employee of The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens, where he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and then became a Lecturer in Irish Literature at The University Of Ulster, assigned to the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages in Derry.

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Alan moved to Edinburgh in 2006 where he is now Professor of Modern Poetry at The University of Edinburgh.

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He has published six collections of poetry. His first, Somebody, Somewhere (Gallery Press, 2004) won the Strong award for Best First Collection in Ireland, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now award for best collection. Hawks and Doves (Gallery Press, 2007) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize. Here Comes the Night (Gallery Press, 2010) was nominated as a book of the year in the Guardian and Irish Times. After the publication of Scapegoat (2014) he was named as a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society in the UK. Following The Readiness (Picador, 2020) his most recent collection is Over Here (Gallery Press, 2025).

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Alan is also a critic and editor. 

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