41 Facts About Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019.

Simon Armitage is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.

Simon Armitage has translated classic poems including the Odyssey, The Death of King Arthur, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Simon Armitage has written several travel books including Moon Country and Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way.

Simon Armitage has edited poetry anthologies including one on the work of Ted Hughes.

Simon Armitage has participated in numerous television and radio documentaries, dramatisations, and travelogues.

Simon Armitage's 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.

Simon Armitage wrote his first poem aged 10 as a school assignment.

Simon Armitage first studied at Colne Valley High School, Linthwaite, and went on to study geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic.

Simon Armitage was a postgraduate student at the University of Manchester, where his MA thesis concerned the effects of television violence on young offenders.

Simon 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.

Simon Armitage 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.

Simon Armitage has written two novels, Little Green Man and The White Stuff, as well as All Points North, a collection of essays on Northern England.

Simon Armitage wrote "All Right" as part of Northern train operator's suicide prevention campaign for Mental Health Awareness Week.

Simon Armitage wrote "Ark" for the naming ceremony of the British Antarctic Survey's new ship RRS Sir David Attenborough on 26 September 2019.

On 12 January 2020, Simon 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.

Simon Armitage read his "Still Life", another poem about the lockdown, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on 20 April 2020.

Huddersfield Choral Society commissioned Simon 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.

Simon 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.

Simon 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.

Simon 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.

In November 2019 Simon 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".

Simon Armitage wrote "Resistance", about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, published in The Guardian on 12 March 2022.

Simon Armitage described it as "a refracted version of what is coming at us in obscene images through the news".

Simon 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.

Simon Armitage 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".

Simon Armitage wrote "The Making of the Flying Scotsman " to mark the centenary of the locomotive Flying Scotsman, which entered service on 24 February 1923.

In November 2019 Simon Armitage announced that each spring for ten years he would spend a week touring five to seven libraries giving a one-hour poetry reading and perhaps introducing a guest poet.

Simon Armitage launched the tour at Exeter library, appearing with his band Land Yacht Regatta.

Simon Armitage then read with Jane Lovell, winner of the 2021 Ginkgo Prize, at Glastonbury library; solo at Eastbourne library; with Laurel Prize-winner Matt Howard and Foyle Young Poet Jenna Hunt at Fakenham library; with Hanan Issa at Gladstone's Library in Hawarden; and with Canal Laureate Roy McFarlane and representatives of Theatre Porto and Boaty Theatre Company at Ellesmere Port library.

Simon Armitage is the author of five stage plays, including Mister Heracles, a version of Euripides' The Madness of Heracles.

Simon Armitage was commissioned in 1996 by the National Theatre in London to write Eclipse for the National Connections series, a play inspired by the real-life disappearance of Lindsay Rimer from Hebden Bridge in 1994, and set at the time of the 1999 solar eclipse in Cornwall.

In 2010, Simon Armitage walked the 264-mile Pennine Way, walking south from Scotland to Derbyshire.

In 2020 and 2021 Simon Armitage produced a podcast, The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, in which, while working on the medieval poem The Owl and the Nightingale, he invited a series of 20 guests to come and talk to him in his garden writing-shed; a third series began in 2023.

Simon Armitage then married radio producer Sue Roberts; they have a daughter, Emmeline, born in 2000.

Simon Armitage is a supporter of his local football team, Huddersfield Town, and refers to it many times in his book All Points North.

Simon Armitage is the first poet laureate who is a disc jockey.

Simon Armitage is a music fan, especially of The Smiths.

Simon Armitage is the lead singer of LYR, a band he is in alongside Richard Walters and Patrick J Pearson.

In May 2020 Simon Armitage was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.

Simon Armitage's choice of music included David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream"; his chosen book was the Oxford English Dictionary, and his luxury was a tennis ball.