About Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage, born 26 May 1963 in Huddersfield, UK, is a hugely acclaimed English poet, novelist, musician, and translator who was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in May 2019, succeeding Carol Ann Duffy. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Unaccompanied (2017), Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989–2014 (2014), Seeing Stars (2010), and The Shout: Selected Poems (2005). He has also translated classic poems including the Odyssey, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Death of King Arthur deals in the cut-and-thrust of warfare and politics: the ever-topical matter of Britain's relationship with continental Europe, and of its military interests overseas. Simon Armitage is already the master of this alliterative music, as his earlier version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2006) so resourcefully and exuberantly showed. His new translation restores a neglected masterpiece of story-telling, by bringing vividly to life its entirely medieval mix of ruthlessness and restraint.He has also written several travel books, including Moon Country and Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way; as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on Northern England.
His poems bring to life the experiences of adolescence, and his work has been featured widely in the school curriculum. The lively energy of his poetry is signaled by his first collections like Zoom! in 1989, Book of Matches (1993) and Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (2006, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize). 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 and in October 2017 he was appointed as the first Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.
He has also received numerous awards for his poetry, including a Lannan Award in 1994, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry “for his body of work” in 2018, and the Violani Landi International Poetry Award, Alma Mater Studiorum from Bologna University in 2025. His book The Dead Sea Poems was short-listed for the Whitbread Book Awards, the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Browse all poems and texts published on Simon Armitage
As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.
