Alan Scott Riach (born 1 August 1957)^[1] is a Scottish poet and academic.^[2]

He was born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, and was educated at Gravesend Grammar School for Boys, Churchill College, Cambridge (BA 1979)^[3] and the University of Glasgow (PhD 1985).^[1] He taught at the University of Waikato in New Zealand from 1986 until 2001.^[4] He is currently the Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow.^[4][5] Riach was President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies from 2006 to 2010 and is a regular contributor to The National.^[6]

• This Folding Map (Auckland University Press, 1990)
• An Open Return (Untold Books, 1991)
• Hugh MacDiarmid's Epic Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1991)
• First & Last Songs (Chapman, 1995)
• The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid:: Scotnotes Study Guide (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1999)
• Clearances (Scottish Cultural Press, 2001)
• Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
• The Scars of Billy Bones: A Toast to the Memory of Robert Louis Stevenson (Robert Louis Stevenson Club, 2008)
• Homecoming: new poems 2001-2009 (Luath, 2009)
• Arts of Independence: the cultural argument and why it matters most (with Alexander Moffat) (Luath, 2014)
• The Birlinn of Clanranald (Kettillonia, 2015)
• The International Companion to Edwin Morgan (editor) (Scottish Literature International, 2015)
• The Hunterian Poems: An Anthology of Poems to Paintings from the collection of The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow (Freight Books, 2015)
• Arts and the Nation: a Critical Re-examination of Scottish Literature, Painting, Music and Culture (with Alexander Moffat and John Purser) (Luath Press, 2017)
• The Winter Book (Luath Press, 2017)