Imlah was brought up in Milngavie near Glasgow, before moving to Beckenham, Kent, in 1966.
He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he subsequently taught as a Junior Fellow.
[1] His collection The Lost Leader (2008) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection,[2] and was shortlisted for the 2009 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Imlah died in January 2009, aged 52, as a result of motor neurone disease.
Alan Hollinghurst dedicated his 2011 novel The Stranger's Child to Imlah's memory; the final section of the novel has the epigraph 'No one remembers you at all' from Imlah's poem 'In Memoriam Alfred Lord Tennyson'.