Simon Armitage (b. 26 May 1963) has been Poet Laureate since 2019, and has long been established as one of Britain’s leading writers. A prodigious talent with enormous energy, his work combines intense social commitment with a strong feeling for landscape, and his enormous and wide-ranging body of work provides ample evidence of his wide-ranging intellectual interests and his polymathic abilities. Since his first collection of poems, Zoom! appeared in 1989, his poetry collections have included The Dead Sea Poems (1995), Travelling Songs (2002), Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (2008), The Unaccompanied (2017), and Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems (2020). Despite his success, Armitage continues to work with smaller poetry presses, and gives his time generously to community groups and other grass-roots organisations. Armitage’s superb translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight appeared in 2007, and has written a number of plays. He has authored two novels, *Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004). He has written extensively for films and radio, and has pioneered the docu-musical format with Brian Hill, and in 2012 published the best-selling non-fiction work, Walking Home, an account of a troubadour journey along the Pennine Way.

His awards include the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the 2017 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation, the Ivor Novello Award for Song Writing, and the BBC Radio Best Speech Programme. He is Vice President of the Poetry Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has received several honorary doctorates. During Britain’s Cultural Olympiad in 2012, Armitage created and curated Poetry Parnassus, a gathering of world poets and poetry from all Olympic nations which is recognised as the biggest coming together of international poets in history.

Born in the village of Marsden he still resides in his native West Yorkshire. Armitage graduated in Geography at the University of Portsmouth. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds, having previously held a Poetry Chair at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Professorship at Princeton. He has also worked at the Falmouth University, University of Leeds, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the University of Sheffield. He was the lead singer of the band The Scaremongers, whose debut album, Born in a Barn was released in 2009, and is currently in the band LYR. He also wrote a libretto for the opera The Assassin Tree, performed at the 2006 [Edinburgh Royal Festival]. His 2010–12 landscape project, co-produced with Pip Hall and Tom Lonsdale saw the installation of a 45-mile Stanza Stones Trail and led to his subsequent work with the Sill Arts Programme in Northumberland National Park.

If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions in relation to the map please contact Dr Mark Frost, English Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk