Simon Armitage was born in 1963 and lives in West Yorkshire. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield and was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2015. He has published over a dozen collections of poetry, most recently Seeing Stars and Paper Aeroplane – Selected Poems 1989 – 2014. His translations of medieval verse include his acclaimed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His new translation of Pearl will be published in May 2016. Armitage’s poems have been part of GCSE and A level exams in this country for nearly two decades now. He is also the author of two novels and three best-selling non-fiction titles, All Points North, Walking Home and Walking Away. The latter recount his experiences of walking the Pennine Way and SW Coast Path as a modern day troubadour giving poetry readings en route. Armitage’s extensive writing for television and radio includes the BAFTA-winning Feltham Sings for which he received a prestigious Ivor Novello Award for song-writing, his BBC2 documentary The Great War: An Elegy and the recent BBC4 drama-documentary Black Roses: the Killing of Sophie Lancaster. Following the success of his play The Last Days of Troy, Armitage’s new dramatic version of Homer’s Odyssey, commissioned by English Touring Theatre, toured nationally in 2015. Simon Armitage is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2010, he was made CBE for services to poetry.
