Simon Armitage

Thursday, 26th April Workshop and Reading 11am and 4.30pm
Simon Armitage was born in 1963 and lives in West Yorkshire.

He has published ten volumes of poetry including Selected Poems, 2001 (Faber & Faber). His most recent collections are Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid and Seeing Stars, both published by Faber & Faber in the UK and Knopf in the United States. He has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes and a Lannan Award.

He writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays, including Mister Heracles, a version of the Euripides play The Madness of Heracles. His recent dramatisation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the BBC, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2004 and is available through BBC Worldwide. It is published by Faber and Faber and by Norton in the US. He received an Ivor Novello Award for his song-lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA.

His first novel, Little Green Man, was published by Penguin in 2001. His second novel, The White Stuff, was published in 2004.

Simon Armitage has taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and is currently a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. With Robert Crawford he edited The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945. Other anthologies include Short and Sweet – 101 Very Short Poems, and a selection of Ted Hughes’ poetry, both published by Faber & Faber.

The Shout, a book of new and selected poems was published in the US in April 2005 by Harcourt. His acclaimed and best-selling translation of the middle English classic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published by Faber & Faber in the UK and Norton in the US. An illustrated version of the translation was published by the Folio Society in 2008.

In 2010 he was awarded the CBE for services to poetry.