Professor Simon Armitage (University of Oxford), ‘Putting Poetry in its Place’

About the speaker:

Simon Armitage is one of Britain’s most distinguished writers.

He is author of over twenty poetry collections, including: Zoom! (1989), Kid (1992), Book of Matches (1993), The Dead Sea Poems (1995), CloudCuckooLand (1997), Killing Time (1999), Travelling Songs (2002), The Universal Home Doctor (2002), Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid (2006), Seeing Stars (2010) and Paper Aeroplanes (2014).

His other writing includes novels – Little Green Man (2001), The White Stuff (2004); stage plays – Mister Heracles (2000), Jerusalem (2005); travel – Walking Home (2012), Walking Away (2015); autobiography – All Points North (1998), Gig (2008); and the libretto for the opera The Assassin Tree (2006). He has translated Homer’s Odyssey (2006), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007) and The Death of King Arthur (2011), and edited several poetry anthologies and collections, including The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (with Robert Crawford; 1998), Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems (1999) and a selection of Ted Hughes’s poetry (2000). He has written for radio, television and film, and contributed to a range of BBC Television and BBC Radio programmes.

Armitage has received numerous awards for his poetry, including the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes, a Lannan Award, and the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. In 2012, at the 25th Hay Festival, he was presented with the Hay Medal for Poetry.

In 2004, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2010, for services to poetry, was appointed CBE.

He is a Vice-President of the Poetry Society and Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.