Simon Armitage

Twilight Readings

For news of Armitage's Twilight Readings at Yorkshire Sculpture Park click on Twilight Readings or download the Flyer

Praise for Gawain

Tributes continue to pour in for Armitage's new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

‘It’s not surprising that, as a northerner, Armitage feels a strong affinity with the poem. He has written pleasingly in this paper about the poem’s vivid contrasts - standard and colloquial English, order and disorder, “exchanges of courtly love contrasting with none-too-subtle sexual innuendo . . . polite, indoor society contrasting with the untamed, unpredictable outdoors”. And what he has done is to adopt and greatly extend this contrast in the language of his translation … I enjoyed it greatly for its kick and music; its high spirits, its many memorable passages. I enjoyed it because, like the Gawain poet, Armitage is some storyteller.’ The Guardian

‘The story is rich, eerie and intoxicating as it follows Gawain from Camelot to his likely doom among the forests and crags and icy streams of the mysterious north … Armitage never lacks for boldness. His enjoyment of the original’s thickly consonantal four-stress alliterative line drives the narrative on at great pace. Nor does he neglect the poem’s concern with pattern, colour and bejewelled decoration of castles, ladies’ costumes and knightly equipment, seen flashing and glowing amid the inhospitable winter landscapes that dominate the poem … [Armitage] honours the original and will win it readers.’

Sean O’Brien, Sunday Times

‘Joining translators such as JRR Tolkien and Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage has taken on one of the earliest stories in English literature … he meets this poetic challenge courageously, staying faithful to the story’s structure and style but filling the Middle English rhythms with his trademark sound … In the story of Gawain, Armitage has found a language capable of change. By insisting on that change, he had found a new poetry, a method of survival. Six hundred years away, Gawain is closer than he has ever been.’ Observer

‘This translation [is] so enjoyable … in another reality, it is read aloud at Christmas instead of everyone watching the family film on TV.’ Leeds Guide

‘Armitage’s animated translation is to be welcomed for helping to liberate Gawain from academia, as Seamus Heaney did in 1999 for Beowulf.’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Simon Armitage, West Yorkshire’s poetic knight errant, is to be commended for his courage in taking on this formidable text … It is to Armitage’s considerable credit that he has produced a version whose rhythms are irrefutably located in the windswept uplands the poem so evocatively conjures. Alan Garner dismissed a previous translation with the remark that the writer should have felt ‘the light of those hills and have the speech of millstone grit on the tongue’. Armitage does all this and more.’ Time Out, Book of the Week

‘Every bit as exciting as any previous version … Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has always been a magnificent yarn. Armitage’s genius is to add fresh polish to an ancient story.’ Sunday Mercury

‘[A] shining contemporary translation, pulsing, coursing with life.’ Yorkshire Post

‘It is a tricksy, sly, deceptive text that Simon Armitage, exceptional West Yorkshire poet and man of many parts has translated wonderfully in this slim, beautifully presented volume … In all it is a sophisticated, multi-layered morality tale which Armitage has rendered in clear, uncluttered lines, making it – most pleasurably – an easy read, just long enough to devour in a day … Armitage just loves the text, and has felt for years that he was in some way destined to translate it. He was right, and his labours were worthwhile. Just as the tale of Beowulf seemed an ideal match for Seamus Heaney’s gruffly broad and bloody lyricism, and Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid resonated with his love of spiritual transformation and heavy sense of fate, so this sprightly, arch, witty and often beautiful tale is a perfect fit for Armitage’s spiky, penetrative northern muse.’ Herald

‘What’s most heartening about this translation is that it doesn't appear to have been done for any reason. It’s not some spritzed-up version of a Greek tragedy that's really about the Gulf War; it doesn't make any claims, as so many reworkings do these days, to be relevant to our own age. It’s done out of a love of language and story-telling. That ought to be enough reason. But there’s another one. By the end of the poem, Gawain has accepted not only the challenge, but also the need to see it through. On the way he speaks the language of love to a woman who turns out to be the Green Knight's wife, and makes a crucial slip in his dealings with her; and from the process Gawain emerges forgiven, and a fuller man than he was before. If Armitage has stretched his own technique and learnt still more about his craft while giving us the spirit of the Gawain poet, so much the better.’ Tom Payne, Daily Telegraph

‘Armitage makes it utterly, even compulsively readable, and as fresh as it must have been in 1400.’ Brian Morton, Sunday Herald

‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the most haunting contributions of the 14^th-century to the legends of King Arthur and Round Table … Simon Armitage, like Ted Hughes a Yorkshireman, also found himself attracted by the way the poem lures its bewildered southern protagonist into a northern setting and vernacular, and his version inventively recreates the original’s gnarled, hypnotic music, its vivid tableaux and landscapes, its weird, unsettling drama. The idiom Armitage develops is delicately responsive to the aural intricacies of Middle English, but also has a free-flowing, colloquial twang that allows the poem to partake of the energies of free speech … As he points out in his introduction, Gawain is at once “a ghost story, a thriller, a romance, an adventure story and a morality tale”. Armitage’s translation is alert to the competing demands of each of these strands, and captures much of this great poem’s beguiling mixture of dreamy magic and bracing vigour.’ Mark Ford, Financial Times 

‘This is a translation to be savoured for its own linguistic merits: Armitage has pored over and polished every word. In the introduction, he writes that his ambition was to produce an independent, living piece of “poetry”. He has certainly done that.’ Alistair Sooke, New Statesman 

RTS Award

Armitage's poem-film Out Of The Blue won the Arts Documentary category at the Royal Television Society Awards on the 13th March 07.  This is his second RTS Award, and joins a BAFTA and an Ivor Novello Award in what is fast becoming a very full trophy cabinet for his media work.  Last year he won the Gold Award at the Spoken Word Awards for his BBC-commissioned dramatisation of The Odyssey.  He told this website he was "proud of the film" and "pleased that channel Five had been so adventurous in commissioning and broadcasting it."  He also praised the film's director, Ned Williams.  Out of the Blue commemorates the events of 9/11 five years after the attacks, and is written as a dramatised elegy from the point of view of a British trader trapped in the North Tower.  Elegiac rather than political, it uses a great deal of archive footage, some of it not previously broadcast on network television.  The poem itself will be published by Enitharmon Press next year, along with two other poems commissioned for radio and television projects

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Abridged Audio

Faber publish Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by Simon Armitage.

Simon and four actors read long extracts from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at the Cottelsloe Theatre at the National Theatre on the SOuth Bank in London

TS Eliot Prize

Armitage has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for his collection Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid.  With the other shortlisted poets he will be reading at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London on Sunday 14th January.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Armitage will be a Visiting Artist at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park for 2007.  To begin his residency he will be launching his new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at the Sculpture Park on Saturday 27th Jan.  Contact YSP for ticket information.

Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid

Author: Simon Armitage

Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: October 5th, 2006
ISBN: 0571233252

Reading at St Giles Church, London

Armitage was on a bill of four poets reading at St Giles Church in London on the 28th September, 2006. He was introduced by Joan Bakewell. The event was organised by the Poetry Society.

The file is 58Mb, and runs for about 26 minutes.

Sir Gawain and Gandalf

Sir Ian McKellen is to read Armitage's new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for BBC Radio 4. The translation, commissioned by Faber & Faber in the UK and Norton in the States, will be published in Britain in January 2007, though copies are likely to be in the shops the week before Christmas to coincide with the BBC broadcast.

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Homer's Odyssey

Author: Simon Armitage

Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: May 4, 2006
ISBN: 0571229352

Man Booker Prize

Armitage has been named as a judge for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, the UK's most prestigious award for fiction, to be announced on 10th October.

University Challenge

Armitage was a starter-for-ten in the 2006 Final of University Challenge.
Paxman: "Which poet, born in Huddersfield in 1963 has published Zoom!, Xanadu..."
Bzzzzzzz....
Paxman: "Yes?"
Manchester: "Simon Armitage."
Paxman: "Correct. In fact he was a student at Manchester University..."

The Facts

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in the village of Marsden and lives in West Yorkshire. He is a graduate of Portsmouth University, where he studied Geography. As a post-graduate student at Manchester University his MA thesis concerned the effects of television violence on young offenders. Until 1994 he worked as Probation Officer in Greater Manchester.

His first collection of poems, Zoom!, was published in 1989 by Bloodaxe Books. Further collections are Xanadu (1992, Bloodaxe Books), Kid (1992, Faber & Faber), Book of Matches (1993, Faber & Faber), The Dead Sea Poems (1995, Faber & Faber), CloudCuckooLand (1997 Faber and Faber), Killing Time (1999 Faber & Faber), Selected Poems (2001, Faber & Faber), Travelling Songs (2002, Faber & Faber), The Universal Home Doctor (2002, Faber & Faber) and Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (2006, Faber & Faber). He has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes and a Lannan Award.

Zoom! was a Poetry Society Book Choice. Kid was short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The Dead Sea Poems was short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Forward Prize and the T.S Eliot Prize. CloudCuckooLand was short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The Universal Home Doctor was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

He writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays, including Mister Heracles, a version of the Euripides play The Madness of Heracles, and Jerusalem, commissioned by West Yorkshire Playhouse. His recent dramatisation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the BBC, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2004 and released on CD through BBC Worldwide. It received the Gold Award at the 2005 Spoken Word Awards. The book, Homer’s Odyssey – A Retelling, is published by Faber and Faber (2006) in the UK and by Norton in the US. For over ten years he has been a regular guest of The Mark Radcliffe Show, first on BBC Radio 1 and more recently on BBC Radio 2. His many contributions to BBC Radio 4 include his co-hosting of Armitage and Moore’s Guide to Popular Song and as a reviewer for the weekly arts programme Front Row.

Simon Armitage has written for over a dozen television films, and with director Brian Hill pioneered the docu-musical format which lead to such cult films as Drinking for England and Song Birds. Song Birds was screened at the Sun Dance Film Festival in 2006. He received an Ivor Novello Award for his song-lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA. He wrote the libretto for the opera The Assassin Tree, composed by Stuart McRae, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2006.

His first novel, Little Green Man, was published by Penguin in 2001. His second novel, The White Stuff was published in 2004. His other prose work includes the best-selling memoir All Points North, (Penguin 1998) which was the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year.

Simon Armitage has taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and is currently a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. With Robert Crawford he edited The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945. Other anthologies include Short and Sweet – 101 Very Short Poems, and a selection of Ted Hughes’ poetry, both published by Faber & Faber.

The Shout, a book of new and selected poems was published in the US in April 2005 by Harcourt. It was short-listed for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. His translation of the middle English classic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was commissioned by Faber & Faber in the UK and Norton in the US and published in 2007.

He has served as a judge for the Forward Prize, the T.S Eliot Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Griffin Prize, and in 2006 was a judge for the Man Booker Prize.

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Readings and Events

2007

14 Jan - TS Eliot Readings, Bloomsbury Theatre, London

23 Jan - National Theatre Platform Event - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

27 Jan - Launch of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at Yorkshire Sculptue Park

25 February - Glasgow Literary Festival

3 March - Reading at The Lowry Centre, Salford, with Opera North

23 March - Reading, The Poetry Cafe, Dorchester

5 May - Reading and Discussion, Brighton Festival

25-28  May - Hay-on-Wye Festival

24 June - Reading, The Elmet Trust, Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire

29 June - Reading, Ledbury Poetry Festival

3 July WH Auden Event - South Bank Centre

15 July - Southwold Lattitude Festival

24 July  - Reading, The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere

22 Aug - Reading, Edinburgh Book Festival

23 - 29 September - The West Yorkshire Sculpture Park Readings Twilight Readings or downlaod the Flyer

Thumbnail Biography

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 and lives in West Yorkshire.

He has published nine volumes of poetry including Killing Time, 1999 (Faber & Faber) and Selected Poems, 2001 (Faber & Faber) His most recent collections are The Universal Home Doctor and Travelling Songs, both published by Faber & Faber in 2002. He has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes and a Lannan Award.

He writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays,
including Mister Heracles, a version of the Euripides play The Madness of Heracles. His recent dramatisation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the BBC, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2004 and is available through BBC Worldwide. It is published by Faber and Faber in May 2006 and by Norton in the US. He received an Ivor Novello Award for his song-lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA.

His first novel, Little Green Man, was published by Penguin in 2001. His second novel The White Stuff was published in 2004.

Simon Armitage has taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and is currently a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. With Robert Crawford he edited The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945. Other anthologies include Short and Sweet – 101 Very Short Poems, and a selection of Ted Hughes’ poetry, both published by Faber & Faber.

The Shout, a book of new and selected poems was published in the US in April 2005 by Harcourt. He is currently working on a translation of the middle English classic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, commissioned by Faber & Faber in the UK and Norton in the US.

His latest collection of poems, Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid is published by Faber and faber in September 2006.

Awards in Full

Awards:
1988 Eric Gregory Award
1992 One of the First Forward Poetry Prizes for Kid
1993 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
1994 Lannan Award
1998 Yorkshire Post Book of the Year for All Points North
2003 BAFTA winner
2003 Ivor Novello Award for songwriting
2004 Fellow of Royal Society for Literature
2005 Spoken Word Award (Gold) for The Odyssey

Zoom! was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Kid was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize. The Dead Sea Poems was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. Killing Time is the one-thousand line poem commissioned by the New Millennium Experience Company. The Universal Home Doctor was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize. The Shout was shortlisted for the Nation Book Critics Circle Award (US).

Short and Sweet

Editor, Short and Sweet, 101 Very Short Poems, published by Faber and Faber 1999.

Poem of the Day

A Vision

The future was a beautiful place, once.

Remember the full-blown balsa-wood town

on public display in the Civic Hall.

The ring-bound sketches, artists’ impressions,

blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel,

board-game suburbs, modes of transportation

like fairground rides or executive toys.

Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.

And people like us at the bottle-bank

next to the cycle-path, or dog-walking

over tended strips of fuzzy-felt grass,

or motoring home in electric cars,

model drivers.  Or after the late show -

strolling the boulevard.  They were the plans,

all underwritten in the neat left-hand

of architects - a true, legible script.

I pulled that future out of the north wind

at the landfill site, stamped with today’s date,

riding the air with other such futures,

all unlived in and now fully extinct.

Taken from the collection Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid, published by Faber & Faber 2006

Radio Works

including:

The Mark Radcliffe Show - contributer, BBC Radio 1, 1995 -1998, BBC Radio 2 2004 to present day.

Second Draft from Saga Land - six programmes for BBC Radio 3, retracing the footsteps of W.H.Auden and Louis MacNeice during their visit to Iceland in 1936.

Eyes of a Demigod - forty-minute commissioned programme on politician Victor Grayson in prose and verse, BBC Radio 3.

The Amherst Myth - BBC Radio 4. Wrote and presented forty-minute documentary feature on Emily Dickinson.

Trading Places - A series of ten interviews with leading British, Irish and American poets.

Points of Reference - BBC Radio 4. Wrote and presented four thirty-minute programmes, in verse, on the history of navigation and orientation.

From Salford to Jericho - Ninety-minute verse drama for BBC Radio 4.

To Bahia and Beyond - with Glyn Maxwell. Five thirty-minute verse/travelogue features from Brazil and the Amazon for BBC Radio 3.

The Bayeux Tapestry - Six part dramatisation for BBC Radio 3, with Geoff Young.
- Armitage and Moore’s Guide to Song – writer and co-presenter, BBC Radio 4

A Tree Full of Monkeys specially commissioned work in collaboration with Zoviet France for the opening of the Baltic in Newcastle. 45 minutes, soundscape and poetry, BBC Radio 3.

The Odyssey – three-part dramatisation, BBC Radio 4, 2004.

Writing the City - BBC Radio 3 Commission. 5 poems, recorded live at the West Yorkshire Playhouse 2005, with other northern writers.

Television/Film

Xanadu (BBC 2 Words On Film, 1992) - wrote and presented a thirty-minute film in verse, set on a housing estate in Lancashire.

Looking For Robinson (BBC2, 1993) wrote and presented a fifty-minute film on the life and work of American poet Weldon Kees, in prose and verse.

One Foot In The Past (BBC2, 1993) - wrote and presented a ten minute film in verse for BBC2's heritage and landscape programme.

The Late Show (BBC2, 1993)

Building Sights (BBC2, 1995) - wrote and presented a ten minute film for BBC2's contemporary architecture programme.

Words From Jerusalem (BBC1, 1995) - wrote and presented a commissioned poem for Easter.

Saturday Night (Century Films, BBC2, 1996) - wrote and narrated a fifty minute poetic commentary to a documentary about night-life in Leeds. Directed by Brian Hill.

Drinking for England (Century Films, BBC2, 1998) - wrote poetry and song for a fifty minute documentary. Directed by Brian Hill.

Killing Time (Century Films, Channel 4) - 90 minute televised version of the millennium poem, transmitted on New Year’s day 2000. Directed by Brian Hill.

The Tyre (Century Films, Channel 4 2001) - Feature film based on poem of same name. Directed by Brian Hill.

Feltham Sings (Century Films, Channel 4 2002) – wrote poetry and song lyrics for a docu-drama set in Feltham Young Offenders Institution. 2003 BAFTA winner. Winner of Ivor Novello award for best music for television. Directed by Brian Hill.

Pornography: The Musical (Century Films, Channel 4 2003) – wrote poetry and song lyrics for docu-drama about women working in the pornography industry. Directed by Brian Hill.

Late Review (BBC2 2002/2003) – contributor to BBC2’s late night art’s review programme.

A Brief Period of Rejoicing - 30 minute commssioned film-poem for Five to commemmorate the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Performed by Sheila Hancock, directed by Ned Williams.

Songbirds (Century Films/Channel 4 2005) - wrote poetry and song for documentary set in Downview women's prison. Directed by Brian Hill.

Out Of The Blue (Silver River/Channel 5) - Armitage's specially commissioned film-poem to commemorate the fifth aniversary of 9.11. Directed by Ned Williams. Perfromed by Rufus Sewell.

Welcome

"...from the long, lifeless mud of the River Colne..."

NEAB Site - English Resources

The Official N.E.A.B./G.C.S.E. site from English Resources.

Includes:

NEAB Quiz on Simon Armitage

NEAB Worksheet on About His Person

NEAB Worksheet on I Am Very Bothered

GCSE Bitesize - Simon Armitage

The search results from BBC's GCSE Bitesize pages on Simon Armitage.

The White Stuff

The White Stuff

Author: Simon Armitage

Publisher: Viking
Published: Feb 5th, 2004
ISBN: 067091343X
Pages: 256

Abbie Fenton wants a child like nothing else on earth. But with her fortieth birthday looming on the horizon, her biological clock is at five-to-midnight. A market researcher for a men’s magazine, she stands in the wind-blasted precinct asking passers-by about their sexual habits and after-shave of choice. If this is life, it wasn’t how she imagined it.

Universal Home Doctor

Universal Home Doctor

Author: Simon Armitage

Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Published: 19 August 2002
ISBN: 0571215335
Price: £12.99
Pages: 66pp.

Published on the same day as Travelling Songs

Travelling Songs - Poem

Oh motorway, motorway, where have you bin, oh motorway where are you stopping? I've bin down to London to pick up the King to take him up north to go shopping.

Oh bring him to us
for a Pontefract cake
and we' 11 light up the sky with a rocket
No, I in taking him home
with the killings he made
with some fluff that he found in his pocket.

From Travelling Songs