Poet and novelist Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in Huddersfield, England. His poetry books include Zoom! (1989), Kid (1992), and CloudCuckooLand (1997), which contains the poem ‘The Tyre’, adapted as a short film in 2000, and ‘Eclipse’, a short performance piece for young people commissioned by the National Theatre in London. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1988, was named ‘Most Promising Young Poet’ at the inaugural Forward Poetry Prize in 1992 and won The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 1993.

Simon has worked extensively in film, radio and television. He wrote and presented Xanadu (1992), a ‘poem film for television’, broadcast by BBC television as part of the ‘Words on Film’ series, and his film about the American poet Weldon Kees was broadcast by the BBC in 1993.

He also wrote the song lyrics for the award-winning Channel 4 film, Feltham Sings, and the libretto for the opera The Assassin Tree, premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2006. Out of the Blue (2008) collects three pieces written in response to the anniversaries of three conflicts: a film-poem about 9/11; a piece commissioned by Channel 5 for VE Day and a radio poem on Cambodia 30 years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

Simon Armitage is currently a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004. The year 2007 saw the publication of his translation, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Homer’s Odyssey, which recasts this epic poem as a series of dramatic dialogues. His latest collection of poetry is The Not Dead (2008). The Poetry of Birds, a collection of poetry he has edited with Tim Dee, was published in October 2009. He has also written two volumes of memoirs: All Points North (1999) and Gig (2009).