Simon Robert Armitage (born 26 May 1963) is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.
He has published over 20 collections of poetry, starting with Zoom! in 1989. Many of his poems concern his home town of Marsden in West Yorkshire; these are collected in Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems. He has translated classic poems including the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and has dramatised the Odyssey. He has written several travel books including Moon Country and Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way. He has edited poetry anthologies including one on the work of Ted Hughes. He has participated in numerous television and radio documentaries, dramatisations, and travelogues.
Early life and education
Armitage was born on 26 May 1963 in Huddersfield, West Riding of Yorkshire, and grew up in the village of Marsden, where his family still live. He has an older sister, Hilary. His father Peter was a former electrician, probation officer and firefighter who was well known locally for writing plays and pantomimes for his all-male panto group, The Avalanche Dodgers.
He wrote his first poem aged 10 as a school assignment. Armitage first studied at Colne Valley High School, Linthwaite, and went on to study geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic. He was a postgraduate student at the University of Manchester, where his MA thesis concerned the effects of television violence on young offenders. Finding himself jobless after graduation, he decided to train as a probation officer, like his father before him. Around this time he began writing poetry more seriously, though he continued to work as a probation officer in Greater Manchester until 1994.
Career
Armitage has lectured on creative writing at the University of Leeds and at the University of Iowa, and in 2008 was a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has made literary, history and travel programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4; and since 1992 he has written and presented a number of TV documentaries. From 2009 to 2012 he was Artist in Residence at London's South Bank, and in February 2011 he became Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. He was elected to serve as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford for 2015–2019. In October 2017 he was appointed as the first Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. In 2019 he was appointed Poet Laureate for ten years, following Carol Ann Duffy. He is a trustee of the National Poetry Centre, a charity established in 2022 which plans to open "a new national home for poetry" in Leeds in 2027. In 2025 he received the Freedom of the City of London, for "his outstanding achievements in the written word and his enthusiastic promotion of poetry, in particular, to the younger generation".
Writing
Armitage's first book-length poetry collection Zoom! was published in 1989. As well as some new poems, it contained works published in three pamphlets in 1986 and 1987. His poetry collections include Book of Matches (1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995). He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on Northern England. He produced a dramatised version of Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize), both published in 2006. Armitage's poems feature in multiple British GCSE syllabuses for English Literature. He is characterised by a dry Yorkshire wit combined with "an accessible, realist style and critical seriousness." His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007) was adopted for the ninth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and he was the narrator of a 2010 BBC documentary about the poem and its use of landscape.
For the Stanza Stones Trail, which runs through of the Pennine region, Armitage composed six new poems on his walks. With the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, the poems were carved into stones at secluded sites. A book, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall, has been produced as a record of that journeyProfile, stanzastones.co.uk; accessed 11 May 2015. and has been published by Enitharmon Press. The poems, complemented with commissioned wood engravings by Hilary Paynter, were also published in several limited editions under the title 'In Memory of Water' by Fine Press Poetry. For National Poetry Day in 2020, BT commissioned him to write "Something clicked", a reflection on lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023 The National Trust commissioned a poem by Armitage for Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire. Artist Adrian Riley collaborated with Armitage and stone carver Richard Dawson to create 'Balancing Act' – a gateway-like public artwork carrying Armitage's poem where the rocks meet moorland.
Armitage's translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh - A New Verse Translation, was published by Liveright in April 2026; it has been described as "A propulsive and lyrical version of ancient Mesopotamia’s greatest adventure–tale".
In 2026, Armitage wrote the script for Aschenputtel, a puppet short film based on the Grimm Brothers' variant of Cinderella and narrated by Anne-Marie Duff.
Writing as Poet Laureate
In 2019 Armitage's first poem as Poet Laureate, "Conquistadors", commemorating the 1969 Moon landing, was published in The Guardian. Includes full text of poem Armitage's second poem as Poet Laureate, "Finishing it", was commissioned in 2019 by the Institute of Cancer Research. Graham Short, a micro-engraver, meticulously carved the entire 51-word poem onto a facsimile of a cancer treatment tablet. Includes full text of poem Armitage wrote "All Right" as part of Northern train operator's suicide prevention campaign for Mental Health Awareness Week. Their video has a soundtrack of the poem being read by Mark Addy, while the words also appear on screen. Includes video of the poem On 21 September 2019 he read his poem "Fugitives", commissioned by the Association of Areas of Natural Beauty, on Arnside Knott, Cumbria, in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, during an event that included the formation of a heart outlined by people on the hillside. Includes full text of poem Armitage wrote "Ark" for the naming ceremony of the British Antarctic Survey's new ship RRS Sir David Attenborough on 26 September 2019. Includes full text of poem "the event horizon" was written in 2019 to commemorate the opening of The Oglesby Centre, an extension to Hallé St Peter's, the Halle orchestra's venue for rehearsals, recordings, education and small performances. The poem is incorporated into the building "in the form of a letter-cut steel plate situated in the entrance to the auditorium, the 'event horizon'". Includes full text of poem "Ode to a Clothes Peg" celebrates the bicentenary of John Keats' six 1819 odes of which Armitage says, "Among his greatest works, the poems are also some of the most famous in the English Language." Includes full text of poem
On 12 January 2020, Armitage gave the first reading of his poem "Astronomy for Beginners", written to celebrate the bicentenary of the Royal Astronomical Society, on BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House. Includes full text of poem "Lockdown", first published in The Guardian on 21 March 2020, is a response to the coronavirus pandemic, referencing the Derbyshire "plague village" of Eyam, which self-isolated in 1665 to limit the spread of the Great Plague of London, and the Sanskrit poem "Meghadūta" by Kālidāsa, in which a cloud carries a message from an exile to his distant wife. Includes full text of poem Armitage read his "Still Life", another poem about the lockdown, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on 20 April 2020. Includes full text of poem An installation of his "The Omnipresent" was part of an outdoor exhibition Everyday Heroes at London's Southbank Centre in autumn 2020. Includes full text of poem Huddersfield Choral Society commissioned Armitage to provide lyrics for works by Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Daniel Kidane, resulting in "The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash" and "We'll Sing", which were released on video in autumn 2020. Armitage asked members of the choir to send him one word each to represent their experience of lockdown, and worked with these to produce the two lyrics. Includes word list Includes full text of poem Includes full text of poem Armitage read "The Bed" in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 2020 at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the burial of The Unknown Warrior. Includes full text of poem
" 'I speak as someone ...' " was first published in The Times on 20 February 2021 and commemorates the 200th anniversary of the death of the poet John Keats, who died in Rome on 23 February 1821. Includes full text of poem To mark a stage in the easing of lockdown, Armitage wrote "Cocoon" which he read on BBC Radio 4's Today on 29 March 2021. "The Patriarchs – An Elegy" marks the death of Prince Philip and was released on the day of his funeral, 17 April 2021. It refers to the snow on the day of his death, and Armitage has said "I've written about a dozen laureate poems since I was appointed, but this is the first royal occasion and it feels like a big one". Includes full text of poem Recording of Armitage reading the poem over a series of photographs Armitage wrote "70 notices" in 2021 as a commission for the Off the Shelf Festival to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the creation of the Peak District National Park. Includes full text of poem "Futurama" was Armitage's response to the 2021 Cop26 conference held in Glasgow, and he said of it "I was trying to chart the peculiar dream-like state we seem to be in, where the rules and natural laws of the old world feel to be in flux". Includes full text of poem In November 2019 Armitage announced that he would donate his salary as poet laureate to create the Poetry School's Laurel Prize for a collection of poems "with nature and the environment at their heart". The prize is to be run by the Poetry School.
Armitage's "Resistance", about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, was published in The Guardian on 12 March 2022. Text of poem Includes full text of poem He called it "a refracted version of what is coming at us in obscene images through the news". Armitage read his "Only Human" at York Minster on 23 March 2022 during a service on the second annual National Day of Reflection to remember lives lost during the COVID-19 pandemic; the poem will be inscribed in a garden of remembrance at the Minster. Includes full text of poem For the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II in June 2022, Armitage wrote "Queenhood". Includes full text of poem It was published in The Times on 3 June and as a signed limited-edition pamphlet sold through commercial outlets (), and on the royal.uk website. He published "Floral Tribute" on 13 September 2022, to commemorate the death of Elizabeth II; it takes the form of a double acrostic in which the initial letters of the lines of each of its two stanzas spell out "Elizabeth". Later that day he explained and read the poem on BBC News at Ten. To celebrate the centenary of the BBC, Armitage wrote "Transmission Report", which was broadcast on The One Show on 24 October 2022, read by a cast of BBC celebrities including Brian Cox, Michael Palin, Mary Berry and Chris Packham, accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Includes full text of poem Includes link to video of the broadcast