Simon Armitage

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a professor of poetry at the University of Leeds and was an Oxford Professor of Poetry from 2015 to 2019. In 2019, he was Visiting Professor at Princeton University in the United States and was elected Honorary Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford. He has authored over a dozen published collections of poetry, three best-selling memoirs and novels. Armitage has written for television films and presented documentaries on subjects ranging from new technology to Homer’s Odyssey. He has made fifty radio dramas and features for BBC Radio 4 and his theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2014. In 2010 he was made CBE for services to poetry. In 2018 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in May 2019 was appointed Poet Laureate. He is the recipient of the Hay Poetry Medal and a prestigious Ivor Novello Award for his lyrics in the BAFTA-winning television film ‘Feltham Sings’. His translation of the medieval poem Pearl won the international PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation.