Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 and lives in West Yorkshire. He is the current national Poet Laureate (2019-2029). He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds and was elected to serve as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford for 2015-2019. In Spring 2019, he held the post of Holmes Visiting Professor at Princeton University, USA.

Armitage has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes, an Eric Gregory Award, a major Lannan Award, a Cholmondeley Award, the Spoken Word Award (Gold), the Ivor Novello Award for song-writing, BBC Radio Best Speech Programme, Television Society Award for Documentary and Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. He won the 2017 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation and was awarded the 2018 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

In 1999 Armitage was named the Millennium Poet. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Armitage was awarded the CBE for services to poetry in 2010 and presented with the Hay Medal for Poetry at the 25th Hay Festival in 2012.

As part of Britain’s 2012 Cultural Olympiad and while Artist in Residence at London’s Southbank, Armitage conceived and curated Poetry Parnassus, a gathering of world poets and poetry from every Olympic nation. This landmark event is generally recognised to be the biggest coming together of international poets in history.

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Simon Armitage

Still

Still is a sequence of poems in response to panoramic photographs of battlefields associated with the Battle of the Somme. Chosen from archives at Imperial War Museum, these astonishingly clear photographic images are ahead of their time. Still was published on the centenary of the battle, which is considered to be one of the bloodiest in British military history. Consequently, Armitage's thirty poems are versions of the infamously tense Georgics by the Roman poet Virgil. The contemporary words meld with the visual devastations of war to haunting effect. Designed by Praline Design Studio and published by Enitharmon Press and the Imperial War Museums, Still is an...

£30.00

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Simon Armitage

Stanza Stones

Stanza Stones The Stanza Stones Trail runs through the Pennine region, containing some of the most striking landscapes in England. Simon Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine walks. With the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, he found extraordinary, secluded sites, and saw his words carved into stone. This book is a record of that journey, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall. Covered in decades of soot and grime, the colours released by the carvings may never return to shades of black. Hence, they become a small reminder of the changes that...

£15.00

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Simon Armitage

Out of the Blue

This book gathers together three important poems by Simon Armitage written for film or radio. Out of the Blue is an award-winning poem-film created after the attacks on the twin towers, told from the point of view of an English trader working in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. With a title from a Churchill speech ‘We May Allow Ourselves a Brief Period of Rejoicing’, Rejoicing is a Channel 5 commission broadcast on the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Additionally, ‘Cambodia’ comes from the radio drama The Violence of Silence set 30 years after the Khmer Rouge.

£8.95