Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage was born on May 26, 1963, in the village of Marsden, in West Yorkshire, England. He received an undergraduate degree in geography from Portsmouth University, followed by a master’s degree in social work from Manchester University where he researched the impact of television violence on young offenders. Before he began to write full-time, Armitage worked as a probation officer in Greater Manchester for six years.

Armitage is the author of numerous poetry collections, including New Cemetery (Alfred A. Knopf, 2026); The Unaccompanied (Faber & Faber, 2017); Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems, 1989–2014 (Faber & Faber, 2014); and The Shout: Selected Poems (Harcourt, 2005), which was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as translations of the Middle English classic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (W. W. Norton, 2013) and a dramatic retelling of Homer’s ancient Greek epic The Odyssey (W. W. Norton, 2011). Armitage is the editor of both a selection of poetry by Ted Hughes and Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems (Faber and Faber, 2002), both published by Faber and Faber in 2009 and 2002, respectively, and the coeditor, with Robert Crawford, of The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (Viking Press, 1998).

Armitage is the author of two novels, The White Stuff (Penguin Books, Ltd., 2004) and Little Green Man (Viking, 2001), as well as the memoir All Points North (Viking, 1998). He also writes widely for radio, television, film, and theater. He wrote both a libretto for the opera The Assassin Tree, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2006 and the play Mister Heracles, a revision of the Euripides piece, The Madness of Heracles. He also authored a film about Weldon Kees and cowrote Moon Country with Glyn Maxwell, which retraced the 1936 trip to Iceland taken by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice.

Widely considered an inheritor of Philip Larkin’s dark wit, Armitage has become one of England’s most respected poets. A reviewer for the Sunday Times wrote: 

Armitage creates a muscular but elegant language of his own out of slangy, youthful, up-to-the-minute jargon and the vernacular of his native Northern England. He combines this with an easily worn erudition ... and the benefit of unblinkered experience ... to produce poems of moving originality.

Armitage is the recipient of numerous awards for poetry, including a Forward Prize and a Lannan Award. Several of his collections have been short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize.

In 2019, Armitage was named the poet laureate of the United Kingdom. He teaches at the University of Leeds and currently serves as the Professor of Poetry of the University of Oxford. He has also taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Sheffield, the University of Falmouth, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Princeton University, among other institutions.