Simon Armitage
Simon Robert Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.
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 Alliterative Morte Arthure, 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.
Early life and education
Armitage was born on 26 May 1963 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. Around this time he began writing poetry more seriously, though he continued to work as a probation officer in Greater Manchester until 1994.
Career
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. 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. 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. He was elected to serve as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford for 2015–2019. In October 2017 he was appointed as the first 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 2025 he received the Freedom of the City of London, for "his outstanding achievements in the written word and his enthusiastic promotion of poetry, in particular, to the younger generation".Writing
Armitage's first book-length poetry collection Zoom! was published in 1989. As well as some new poems, it contained works published in three pamphlets in 1986 and 1987.His poetry collections include Book of Matches and The Dead Sea Poems. He has written two novels, Little Green Man and The White Stuff, as well as All Points North, 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, 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 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 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. 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.
Writing as Poet Laureate
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. Graham Short, a micro-engraver, meticulously carved the entire 51-word poem clearly onto a facsimile of a cancer treatment tablet. Armitage wrote "All Right" as part of Northern train operator's suicide prevention campaign for Mental Health Awareness Week. Their video has a soundtrack of the poem being read by Mark Addy, while the words also appear on screen. On 21 September 2019 he read his poem "Fugitives", commissioned by the Association of Areas of Natural Beauty, on Arnside Knott, Cumbria, in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, during an event which included the formation of a heart outlined by people on the hillside. Armitage wrote "Ark" for the naming ceremony of the British Antarctic Survey's new ship RRS Sir David Attenborough on 26 September 2019. "the event horizon" was written in 2019 to commemorate the opening of The Oglesby Centre, an extension to Hallé St Peter's, the Halle orchestra's venue for rehearsals, recordings, education and small performances. The poem is incorporated into the building "in the form of a letter-cut steel plate situated in the entrance to the auditorium, the 'event horizon'". "Ode to a Clothes Peg" celebrates the bicentenary of John Keats' six 1819 odes of which Armitage says, "Among his greatest works, the poems are also some of the most famous in the English Language."
On 12 January 2020, Armitage gave the first reading of his poem "Astronomy for Beginners", written to celebrate the bicentenary of the Royal Astronomical Society, on BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House. "Lockdown", first published in The Guardian on 21 March 2020, is a response to the coronavirus pandemic, referencing the Derbyshire "plague village" of Eyam, which self-isolated in 1665 to limit the spread of the Great Plague of London, and the Sanskrit poem "Meghadūta" by Kālidāsa, in which a cloud carries a message from an exile to his distant wife. Armitage read his "Still Life", another poem about the lockdown, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on 20 April 2020. An installation of his "The Omnipresent" was part of an outdoor exhibition Everyday Heroes at London's Southbank Centre in autumn 2020. Huddersfield Choral Society commissioned Armitage to provide lyrics for works by Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Daniel Kidane, resulting in "The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash" and "We'll Sing", which were released on video in autumn 2020. Armitage asked members of the choir to send him one word each to represent their experience of lockdown, and worked with these to produce the two lyrics. Armitage read "The Bed" in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 2020 at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the burial of The Unknown Warrior.
" 'I speak as someone...' " was first published in The Times on 20 February 2021 and commemorates the 200th anniversary of the death of the poet John Keats, who died in Rome on 23 February 1821. To mark a stage in the easing of lockdown, Armitage wrote "Cocoon" which he read on BBC Radio 4's Today on 29 March 2021. "The Patriarchs – An Elegy" marks the death of Prince Philip and was released on the day of his funeral, 17 April 2021. It refers to the snow on the day of his death, and Armitage has said "I've written about a dozen laureate poems since I was appointed, but this is the first royal occasion and it feels like a big one". Armitage wrote "70 notices" in 2021 as a commission for the Off the Shelf Festival to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the creation of the Peak District National Park. "Futurama" was Armitage's response to the 2021 Cop26 conference held in Glasgow, and he said of it "I was trying to chart the peculiar dream-like state we seem to be in, where the rules and natural laws of the old world feel to be in flux". In November 2019 Armitage announced that he would donate his salary as poet laureate to create the Poetry School's Laurel Prize for a collection of poems "with nature and the environment at their heart". The prize is to be run by the Poetry School.
Armitage wrote "Resistance", about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, published in The Guardian on 12 March 2022. He described it as "a refracted version of what is coming at us in obscene images through the news". Armitage read his "Only Human" at York Minster on 23 March 2022 during a service on the second annual National Day of Reflection to remember lives lost during the COVID-19 pandemic; the poem will be inscribed in a garden of remembrance at the Minster. For the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II in June 2022, Armitage wrote "Queenhood". It was published in The Times on 3 June and as a signed limited-edition pamphlet sold through commercial outlets, and on the royal.uk website. He published "Floral Tribute" on 13 September 2022, to commemorate the death of Elizabeth II; it takes the form of a double acrostic in which the initial letters of the lines of each of its two stanzas spell out "Elizabeth". Later that day he explained and read the poem on BBC News at Ten. To celebrate the centenary of the BBC, Armitage wrote "Transmission Report", which was broadcast on The One Show on 24 October 2022, read by a cast of BBC celebrities including Brian Cox, Michael Palin, Mary Berry and Chris Packham, accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Armitage wrote "The Making of the Flying Scotsman " to mark the centenary of the locomotive Flying Scotsman, which entered service on 24 February 1923. On World Poetry Day, 21 March 2023, he released his "Plum Tree Among the Skyscrapers", the first of a series of 10 works to be commissioned by the National Trust and created by Armitage and his band LYR. For the coronation of Charles III and Camilla on 6 May 2023, Armitage wrote "An Unexpected Guest", telling the tale of a woman invited to attend the coronation in Westminster Abbey, and quoting from Samuel Pepys' diary entry recording the coronation of Charles II in 1661.
In July 2023, Armitage spent time on Spitsbergen at the British Antarctic Survey's Ny-Ålesund research station, and wrote a group of poems relating to his visit. "The Summit" was published in The Guardian in October 2023, ahead of a series of four BBC Radio 4 programmes called Poet Laureate in the Arctic, broadcast from 10 October 2023. "Polaris" was the lyric used for BBC Radio 3 2023 Carol Competition: Armitage said "I was hoping to write something that might appeal to people of different backgrounds and different ages, with a narrative and maybe a slight nursery rhyme or nonsense feel to it, but with a serious and timely message at its heart. I don't think there are any other carols that begin with the words "The police…!"". "Megalosaurus" celebrates the 200th anniversary of the naming of the megalosaurus and was commissioned by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. "Hinge" forms part of a collaboration with sculptor Anthony Gormley, commissioned by Trinity College, Oxford: the poem is displayed in relief on a rusting metal door which leads into the college grounds from Parks Road and unveiled in March 2025. His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service commissioned "A Life In The Day Of" as part of a March 2025 campaign aiming to recruit probation officers with life experience, the way Armitage's father had joined the service; Armitage drew on his own memories of work as a probation officer. Portsmouth City Council commissioned "The Theatre of the Sea" which is cast in brass letters and embedded in the sea defence wall at Southsea, unveiled in April 2025; Armitage commented that it was "a great honour and a wonderful kind of reunion" to write a poem for the city where he studied for his geography degree. "The Definition of a Town" was commissioned by Kirklees Council and will be inlaid in the pavement of a New Street in Huddersfield. "In Retrospect" was commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces to mark the 80th anniversary, in May 2025, of VE Day. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened on 27 September 1825, and Armitage's "The Longest Train in the World" celebrates the history of railways, commissioned as part of "Railway 200".