Biografia
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 pu
