Simon Armitage – författare

One of the founding stories of English literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse who rudely interrupts Camelot’s Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager. The virtuous Gawain accepts and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. The following Yuletide, Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dreamlike castle, a dire challenge answered—and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.Preserved on a single surviving manuscript dating from around 1400, composed by an anonymous master, this Arthurian epic was rediscovered only two hundred years ago and published for the first time in 1839. Following in the tradition of Ted Hughes, Marie Borroff, and J.R.R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage—one of England’s leading poets—has produced an inventive translation that resounds with both clarity and spirit. His work, presented here with facing original text and a note by Harvard scholar James Simpson, is meticulously responsible to the sophistication of the original but succeeds equally in its ambition to be read as a totally new poem. It is as if two poets, six hundred years apart, set out on a journey through the same mesmerizing landscapes—acoustic, physical, and metaphorical—to share in and double the pleasure of this enchanting classic.

Simon Armitage's new collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. Here comes everybody: Snoobie and Carla, Lippincott, Wittmann, Yoshioka, Bambuck, Dr Amsterdam, Preminger. The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life; an orgiastic cast of unreconstructed pie-worshipers at a Northern sculpture farm; the soap-opera supremacists at their zoo-wedding; the driver who picks up hitchhikers as he hurtles towards a head-on collision with Thatcherism; a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town; the black bear with a dark secret, the woman who curates giant snowballs in the chest freezer. Celebrities and nobodies, all come to the ball.The storyteller who steps in and out of this human tapestry changes, trickster-style, from poem to poem, but retains some identifying traits: the melancholy of the less deceived, crossed with an undercover idealism. And he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being 'genuine in his disbelief'.Language is on the loose in these poems, which cut and run across the parterre of poetic decorum with their cartoon-strip energies and air of misrule. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.

Zoom! is the book which launched Simon Armitage's meteoric rise to poetic stardom. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award in 1989 and was a Poetry Book Society Choice.The e-book edition of Zoom! incorporates audio files for 18 of the poems using recordings Simon Armitage made for Peter Sansom in Huddersfield in 1989. So the voice you hear is that of Simon Armitage, then aged 26, when he was still working as a probation officer and had just published his first book of poems.

This gorgeously illustrated collection of poems illuminates and reimagines the ingenious, fragile dwellings of the living creatures around us.Poet Laureate Simon Armitage was inspired to write these poems by the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, an ambitious restoration project where history and mystery coexist. The reawakened landscape with its woods, meadows and 'jungle' offers a bustling, fertile realm for all sorts of creatures to inhabit. Armitage uses elements of riddle and folklore to animate a series of dwellings: the 'twig-and-leaf crow's-nest squat' of a squirrel's drey, a beaver lodge's 'spillikin stave church' and a hive's 'reactor core'. Distinctions between human and animal, natural and cultivated, are blurred, emphasising commonality and creating a vibrant account of 'non-stop stop-motion life'.Dwell warns of the fragility of these spaces and their dwellers, exposed to relentless and sadly familiar environmental threats. Just as a garden provides refuge for wildlife, so do these intricate poems offer lasting homes to those who dwell within their lines.This edition is beautifully illustrated by Beth Munro.'These are poems full of a winning, pleasurable charm.' Guardian Best Recent Poetry

'Extremely funny' Sunday Telegraph_____________________________A poet is a rock star without the sex'n'drugs, or the rock'n'roll. But that never stopped Simon Armitage dreaming, and in Gig, he explores how music and the muse intertwine in work and in life. Crammed with stories, anecdotes, jokes, absurdities, the odd informal homily, pitfalls and pratfalls (not all the author's own), Yorkshire life and death, Gig is about the dream and reality of what you are, and what you might have been._____________________________'One of our most entertaining authors' Independent'Very, very funny' GQ'Witty, terrific, stupendously funny' Daily Telegraph Simon Armitage, Sunday Times bestseller, April 2024

Preserved on a single surviving manuscript dating from around 1400, composed by an anonymous master, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was rediscovered only 200 years ago, and published for the first time in 1839. One of the earliest great stories of English literature, after Beowulf, the poem narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts the Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager. The virtuous Gawain accepts, and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. Next Yuletide Gawain dutifully sets forth... His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dream-like castle, a dire challenge answered - and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.

'A firework display of technique, versatility and passion.' Independent on Sunday'The crafted sincerity of this potent, lyrical collection, in which an absolutely contemporary voice concisely expresses common concerns, is everything that poetry should be.' Times Literary Supplement'The first poet of serious artistic intent since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity . . . it is possible that he will attain the sort of proverbial status Larkin now occupies.' Sean O'Brien, The Deregulated Muse

A STUNNING COLLECTION OF POEMS CURATED BY THE NEW POET LAUREATE AND THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FOUR FIELDS___________________________'Some of the most ethereal verse ever written' Sunday Telegraph 'A glorious collection of works old and new' Independent on Sunday 'Truly inexhaustible . . . to be read again and again' Daily Mail 'A rich and sustaining larder, a marvellously realized sourcebook of flights of feathered fancy' Guardian 'A life-affirming celebration of the commonplace yet enduringly mysterious creatures we share this world with and the poetry they have inspired' Daily Telegraph

'A joy. Celebrates the real world and revels in its mad glory' Sue Townsend, Sunday Times_____________________________________All Points North is part-memoir and part-excursion. Charting the rugged and uneven terrain of a writer's formative years - from tax problems to probation to American tours, football to family to running away to Iceland - Simon Armitage explores growing up and being Northern. It's about humour, language, writing, film, houses, homes, time wasters, one loose tyre, you, me and all points in-between._____________________________________'Laugh-out-loud funny' Independent'A delight' Jonathan Raban, Times Literary Supplement 'A perfect holiday dipper' Scotsman'An Alan Bennett-style diary' Daily Telegraph

In this new verse adaptation, originally commissioned for BBC radio, Simon Armitage has recast Homer's epic as a series of bristling dramatic dialogues: between gods and men; between no-nonsense Captain Odysseus and his unruly, lotus-eating, homesick companions; and between subtle Odysseus (wiliest hero of antiquity) and a range of shape-shifting adversaries—Calypso, Circe, the Sirens, the Cyclops—as he and his men are "pinballed between islands" of adversity. One of the most individual voices of his generation, Armitage revitalizes our sense of the Odyssey as oral poetry, as indeed one of the greatest of tall tales.

First appearing around 1400, The Death of King Arthur is one of the most widely beloved and spectacularly alliterative poems penned in Middle English. While it is more than six centuries old, this magisterial new translation has finally given American readers the ability to experience the splendor and poignancy of the original. Echoing the lyrical passion that so distinguished Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, Simon Armitage has produced a virtuosic translation of a timeless masterpiece, one that follows Arthur’s bloody conquests across Europe, all the way to his spectacular and even bloodier downfall. This unparalleled presentation of the greatest Arthurian tale promises to become the definitive edition for generations to come.

Kid gives us one of the liveliest poetic voices to have emerged in the last ten years. Simon Armitage's inspired ear for the demotic and his ability to deal with subjects that many poets turn their backs on have marked him as a poet of originality and force.

Simon Armitage is the most widely and unreservedly praised poet of his generation. The Dead Sea Poems, his fourth collection, culminates in a long visionary poem, 'Five Eleven Ninety Nine'. Elsewhere, questions of belief and trust, of identity and knowledge, dealt with as they occur in everyday domestic life, contribute to a picture of our contemporary world that is at once realistic and touched with a unique imaginative intensity.

Six friends are interviewed by the police after the disappearance of Lucy Lime, the strange unnerving girl - 'I am a walking Universe, I am' - whom they met on the beach beneath the cliffs.Adie likes Gary who likes Shelley who likes Adie. Relationships are strained as they 'sort out what they can put up with, and what they can't' - under the shadow of a soldier on a Great War memorial.Eclipse by Simon Armitage and Friendly Fire by Peter Gill were specially commissioned by the National Theatre for the BT National Connections Scheme for young people.If we hope to have discerning practitioners and audiences tomorrow we must ensure that work of quality is available to young people now. The Connections series is designed to provide such work in easily accessible volumes.

Radio Castle, the voice of Jerusalem. Your local news broadcast from the bed of housebound ex-fireman, John Edward. His son doesn't want to join the family business, and his wife is in love with the town's ex-policeman, but Radio Castle continues to broadcast despite everything life throws at John Edward. When the coveted position of Entertainment Secretary at the Jerusalem Social Club comes up, only one man stands between John Edward and his dream - a certain ex-policeman. As two old adversaries square up, who will get the girl and who will get the job?This dark musical comedy premieres at West Yorkshire Playhouse in November 2005.

"The Universal Home Doctor" is Simon Armitage's most personal collection of poems yet. The poems journey across the globe but are ultimately set against the most intimate of landscapes - the human body.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature.Ted Hughes (1930-98) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957. His last collection, Birthday Letters, was published in 1998 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1998.

Originally commissioned for BBC Radio, Simon Armitage recasts Homer's epic as a series of dramatic dialogues. His version bristles with the economy, wit and guile that we have come to expect from one of the most individual voices of his generation.

One summer, Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way - a challenging 256-mile route usually approached from south to north, with the sun, wind and rain at your back. However, he resolved to tackle it back to front, walking home towards the Yorkshire village where he was born, travelling as a 'modern troubadour', without a penny in his pockets and singing for his supper with poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms. Walking Home describes his extraordinary, yet ordinary, journey of human endeavour, unexpected kindnesses and terrible blisters.The companion volume, Walking Away, is published in June 2015.

Short and Sweet is an inspiring anthology arranged to show how the short poem, defined here as no longer than thirteen lines - and sometimes a lot shorter than that - can tell a story, present a complex argument, and be packed with as much passion, wisdom and music as any more extended piece of writing. In his witty and instructive introduction, Simon Armitage, pace-setting poet of his generation, encourages us to consider how poets over five centuries have used brevity.

Not content with walking the Pennine Way as a modern day troubadour, an experience recounted in his bestseller and prize-wining Walking Home, the restless poet has followed up that journey with a walk of the same distance but through the very opposite terrain and direction far from home. In Walking Away Simon Armitage swaps the moorland uplands of the north for the coastal fringes of Britain's south west, once again giving readings every night, but this time through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, taking poetry into distant communities and tourist hot-spots, busking his way from start to finsh.From the surreal pleasuredome of Minehead Butlins to a smoke-filled roundhouse on the Penwith Peninsula then out to the Isles of Scilly and beyond, Armitage tackles this personal Odyssey with all the poetic reflection and personal wit we've come to expect of one of Britain's best loved and most popular writers.

By the Poet LaureateThe Alliterative Morte Arthure - the title given to a four-thousand line poem written sometime around 1400 - was part of a medieval Arthurian revival which produced such masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory's prose Morte D'Arthur. The Death of King Arthur deals in the cut-and-thrust of warfare and politics: the ever-topical matter of Britain's relationship with continental Europe, and of its military interests overseas. Simon Armitage is already the master of this alliterative music, as his earlier version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2006) so resourcefully and exuberantly showed. His new translation restores a neglected masterpiece of story-telling, by bringing vividly to life its entirely medieval mix of ruthlessness and restraint.

WINNER OF THE PEN AWARD FOR POETRY IN TRANSLATIONPearl is an entrancing allegorical tale of grief and lost love, as the narrator is led on a Dantean journey through sorrow to redemption by his vanished beloved. Retaining all the alliterative music of the original, a Middle English poem thought to be by the same anonymous author responsible for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl is here brought to vivid and intricate life in the care of one of the finest poets writing today.

Simon Armitage is rightly celebrated as one of the country's most original and engaging poets; but he is also an adaptor and translator of some of our most important epics, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Death of King Arthur and Homer's Odyssey. The latter, originally a commission for BBC Radio, rendered the classical tale with all the flare, wit and engagement that we have come to expect from this most distinctive of contemporary authors, and in so doing brought Odysseus's return from the Trojan War memorably to life.

A high-ranking government minister with a colourful past is sent on a diplomatic mission to Istanbul. When his trip ends up in a bar-room brawl, he becomes Europe's most wanted man overnight. Chased by the authorities, damned by religious leaders, pursued by those looking for vengeance and head-hunted by fanatics, his odyssey begins. Plunged into the ancient past, Odysseus must now contend with all the unworldly beings and unnatural phenomena that stand in his way. The Cyclops, the Sirens, witches, whirlpools and flesh-eating armies must all be overcome in the struggle for survival and the long voyage back home.Simon Armitage's The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead premiered at the Liverpool Everyman in September 2015 then toured the UK in a co-production with English Touring Theatre.

'The most popular English poet since Larkin.' Sunday TimesAfter more than a decade and following his celebrated adventures in drama, translation, travel writing and prose poetry, Simon Armitage's eleventh collection of poems heralds a return to his trademark contemporary lyricism. The pieces in this multi-textured and moving volume are set against a backdrop of economic recession and social division, where mass media, the mass market and globalisation have made alienation a commonplace experience and where the solitary imagination drifts and conjures. The Unaccompanied documents a world on the brink, a world of unreliable seasons and unstable coordinates, where Odysseus stalks the aisles of cut-price supermarkets in search of direction, where the star of Bethlehem rises over industrial Yorkshire, and where alarm bells for ailing communities go unheeded or unheard. Looking for certainty the mind gravitates to recollections of upbringing and family, only to encounter more unrecoverable worlds, shaped as ever through Armitage's gifts for clarity and detail as well as his characteristic dead-pan wit. Insightful, relevant and empathetic, these poems confirm The Unaccompanied as a bold new statement of intent by one of our most respected and recognised living poets. 'A writer who has had a game-changing influence on his contemporaries.' Guardian'Armitage is that rare beast: a poet whose work is ambitious, accomplished and complex as well as popular.' Sunday Telegraph'The best poet of his generation.' Craig Raine, Observer

Over the course of several years, Simon Armitage has written hundreds of poems for various projects, commissions, collaborations and events, which stand outside of his mainstream collections but now form a substantial body of work in their own right. They vary from single poems, such as 'Zodiac T Shirt', written to be performed at the launch of Beck's Song Reader, to the suite of ten poems about Branwell Brontë written at the time of the writer's bicentenary. Some have been published - such as the Walking Home and Walking Away poems - but the majority has not, and together they cover an eclectic array of subjects including sculpture, the environment, travel, drama, and media. Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic represents the nature and scale of Armitage's work - it is an important reflection of his public engagement as a poet and the astonishing range of his interests and talents.

When a mysterious green knight arrives unbidden at Camelot one Christmas, only the young and inexperienced Gawain is brave or foolhardy enough to take up his challenge . . .This story, first told in the late fourteenth century, is one of the most enthralling, enigmatic and beloved poems in the English language. Simon Armitage's version is meticulously responsive to the tact, sophistication and dramatic intensity of the original. It is as if, six hundred years apart, two poets set out on a journey through the same mesmeric landscape - physical, allegorical and acoustic - in the course of which the Gawain poet has finally found his true translator.The poem's key episodes have been visualised into a series of bold, richly textured screen-prints by British artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. They are reproduced here, alongside Armitage's revised text, to create a special edition of this marvellous classic.