Alan Gillis
Professor of Modern Poetry

- English Literature
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
- Tel: +44 (0)131 650 3050
- Email: Alan.Gillis@ed.ac.uk
- Web: Edinburgh Research Explorer profile
Address
- Street
-
Room 2.41
50 George Square - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9LH
Availability
Office Hour: Fridays 11am -12pm
Background
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.
Research summary
A poet and critic, Alan published his fifth book of poems The Readiness (2020) with Picador, and in the USA with Wake Forest University Press. Previously, Wake Forest published Scapegoat and Other Poems (2016), which gathered work from four poetry books published by The Gallery Press: Scapegoat (2014), Here Comes the Night (2010), Hawks and Doves (2007) and Somebody, Somewhere (2004). Alan was selected as a ‘Next Generation Poet’ by the Poetry Book Society in the UK in 2014, has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize, and for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, and was winner of the Strong Award for Best First Collection in Ireland.
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/or given conference papers on 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 W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Durcan, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson. He is interested in poetics generally, especially concerning the modern and contemporary lyric.
He would welcome creative writing proposals, and research proposals in the area of modern and contemporary poetry.
-
Late negotiations: Ecopoetry and Kathleen Jamie
(20 pages)
In:
Contemporary Women's Writing, vol. 14, pp. 238-257
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa023
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
The Readiness
(80 pages)
Research output: › Book (Published) -
Two poems
(3 pages)
Poems › Other contribution (Published) -
The interior: The Caught Habits of Language: for W. S. Graham
(2 pages)
Poem in anthology › Other contribution (Published) -
Paul Durcan
(14 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108333313.029
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
Two poems
(3 pages)
Poems in journal › Other contribution (Published) -
Flowers from the Dark: Poems from the Tower Poetry Summer School 2016
(72 pages)
Research output: › Anthology (Published) -
Scapegoat and Other Poems
(176 pages)
Research output: › Book (Published) -
[Review of] Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time, by Tom Walker
(5 pages)
In:
Irish University Review, vol. 46, pp. 397-401
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/iur.2016.0238
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Book/Film/Article review (Published) -
Review: After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon
(7 pages)
In:
Poetry Ireland Review, pp. 103-09
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Book/Film/Article review (Published)