Born in Stockport, near Manchester, and raised in an environment of working people, Riley entered higher education through Britain’s post-war socialistic educational policies. He read English at Cambridge University and has since lived and worked in the UK and abroad in various kinds of teaching and casual employment. Since 1985 he has lived in Cambridge, where for nearly two decades he operated a mail-order poetry book business. He has written studies of Jack Spicer, T. F. Powys, improvised music, poetry, lead mines, burial mounds, village carols and Transylvanian string bands, and has published two books of translations from the French poet Lorand Gaspar. He has been an advocate for neglected British poets from the 1930s and 1940s, in particular Nicholas Moore (1918-1986), and he has edited several posthumous books of Moore's.

Riley was the co-editor (with Andrew Crozier and others) of the important poetry/poetics journal The English Intelligencer (1965-1968), and editor of the later Collection (1968-1970). From the 1980s to the 2000s he ran the imprint Poetical Histories, which focussed on brief (4-12pp) pamphlets published on fine paper. Notable publications included J.H. Prynne's Marzipan and his sole poem in Chinese, Jie ban mi Shi Hu; R. F. Langley's Man Jack; and late work by the older poets Sean Rafferty and Dorian Cooke.

In the 1970s Riley was an important early promoter of and advocate for British free improvisation, and the noted guitarist Derek Bailey was a lifelong friend; two of Bailey's late solo albums, Takes Fakes & Dead She Dances and Poetry and Playing, contain tracks of Bailey playing guitar while reading aloud from Riley's poetry. Several books of Riley's from this period are responses to free jazz and free improvisation: The Musicians The Instruments (poetry, The Many Press, 1978) and Company Week (prose, Compatible Recording and Publishing, 1994) in response to Bailey's 1977 Company Week event, and The Whole Band (Sesheta, 1972), in response to performances by John Tchicai's Cadentia Nova Danica. This habit of responding to music in his poetry has continued in more recent work, such as the Reader/Author/Lecture series (with poems for or after Syd Barrett, Arnold Schoenberg, John Sheppard &c) and his more recent books concerning music encountered on his travels in Eastern Europe.

Riley was the subject of an essay collection, The Poetry of Peter Riley (The Gig, 1999/2000) and a poetry festschrift, April Eye (Infernal Methods, 2000).

Distant Points is a series of prose poems arising from the author’s meditations on 19th century excavation reports of prehistoric burial mounds in the north of England. As Riley himself explains, this particular work is:

Commenting on this work, American poet and Zukofsky scholar Mark Scroggins offers this insight:

• Love-Strife Machine (Ferry Press, 1969)

• The Linear Journal (Grosseteste Press, 1973)

• Lines on the Liver (Ferry Press, 1981)

• Tracks and Mineshafts (Grosseteste Press, 1983)

• Distant Points: Excavations Part One, Books One and Two (Reality Street Editions, 1995)

• Snow has Settled [ ] Bury Me Here (Shearsman Books, 1997)

• Passing Measures, Selected poems 1966-1996 (Carcanet, 2000)

• Messenger Street (Poetical Histories, 2001) note: this is a pamphlet containing four elegies for the poet Douglas Oliver

• The Dance at Mociu (Shearsman, 2003)

• Alstonefield: a poem (Carcanet, 2003)