Simon Armitage

Simon Robert Armitage (born 26 May 1963) is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist.

As well as some new poems, it contained works published in three pamphlets in 1986 and 1987.

He has published over 20 collections of poetry, starting with Zoom! in 1989.

Many of his poems concern his home town in West Yorkshire; these are collected in Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems.

He has translated classic poems including the Odyssey, The Death of King Arthur, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

He has written several travel books including Moon Country and Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way.

He has edited poetry anthologies including one on the work of Ted Hughes.

He has participated in numerous television and radio documentaries, dramatisations, and travelogues.

Armitage was born in Huddersfield, West Riding of Yorkshire, and grew up in the village of Marsden, where his family still live.

He has an older sister, Hilary.

His father Peter was a former electrician, probation officer and firefighter who was well known locally for writing plays and pantomimes for his all-male panto group, The Avalanche Dodgers.

He wrote his first poem aged 10 as a school assignment.

Armitage first studied at Colne Valley High School, Linthwaite, and went on to study geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic.

He was a postgraduate student at the University of Manchester, where his MA thesis concerned the effects of television violence on young offenders.

Finding himself jobless after graduation, he decided to train as a probation officer, like his father before him.

Armitage's first book-length poetry collection Zoom! was published in 1989.

He has made literary, history and travel programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4; and since 1992 he has written and presented a number of TV documentaries.

His poetry collections include Book of Matches (1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995).

Around this time he began writing poetry more seriously, though he continued to work as a probation officer in Greater Manchester until 1994.

He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on Northern England.

He produced a dramatised version of Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), both published in 2006.

Armitage's poems feature in multiple British GCSE syllabuses for English Literature.

He is characterised by a dry Yorkshire wit combined with "an accessible, realist style and critical seriousness."

His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007) was adopted for the ninth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and he was the narrator of a 2010 BBC documentary about the poem and its use of landscape.

For the Stanza Stones Trail, which runs through 47 mile of the Pennine region, Armitage composed six new poems on his walks.

With the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, the poems were carved into stones at secluded sites.

A book, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall, has been produced as a record of that journey and has been published by Enitharmon Press.

The poems, complemented with commissioned wood engravings by Hilary Paynter, were also published in several limited editions under the title 'In Memory of Water' by Fine Press Poetry.

He has lectured on creative writing at the University of Leeds and at the University of Iowa, and in 2008 was a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

From 2009 to 2012 he was Artist in Residence at London's South Bank, and in February 2011 he became Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield.

In October 2017 he was appointed as the first Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.

He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019.

He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.

In 2019 he was appointed Poet Laureate for ten years, following Carol Ann Duffy.

He is a trustee of the National Poetry Centre, a charity established in 2022 which plans to open "a new national home for poetry" in Leeds in 2027.

In 2019 Armitage's first poem as Poet Laureate, "Conquistadors", commemorating the 1969 Moon landing, was published in The Guardian.

Armitage's second poem as Poet Laureate, "Finishing it", was commissioned in 2019 by the Institute of Cancer Research.

For National Poetry Day in 2020, BT commissioned him to write "Something clicked", a reflection on lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2023 The National Trust commissioned a poem by Armitage for Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire.

Artist Adrian Riley collaborated with Armitage and stone carver Richard Dawson to create 'Balancing Act' - a gateway-like public artwork carrying Armitage's poem where the rocks meet moorland.