Dates

• Existence: 1940-

Biography

Peter Riley, poet, publisher and bookseller, was born in Stockport in 1940, and read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge (B.A. 1963, M.A. 1969). He worked at various jobs in London and then moved to Hastings and Hove, pursuing a part-time thesis on the novelist and story-writer T. F. Powys at the University of Sussex. He was a subscriber to 'The English Intelligencer', a worksheet privately circulated between poets connected with Cambridge, and was its editor for part of 1967. Between 1969 and 1972 he was a lecturer at the University of Odense (Denmark). In addition to writing on literary topics he pursued interests in avant-garde jazz and free improvised music. After spells living in Macclesfield and the Peak District, during which he undertook a part-time M.A. thesis on Jack Spicer at the University of Keele and commenced a mail-order second-hand book business (which continued until 2005) Riley returned to Cambridge in 1985, where he participated in running the Cambridge Conference on Contemporary Poetry and published the 'Poetical Histories'. In 2013 he moved to Yorkshire.

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