Simon Armitage author page

Simon Armitage biography

Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and studied geography at Portsmouth University before completing an MS in social work at Manchester University. He worked as a probation officer for six years before focusing on poetry. His first poetry collection, Zoom!, was published in 1989, and Kid won the Forward Prize in 1992.

Armitage’s poetry collections include Seeing Stars (2010), Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989–2014, The Unaccompanied (2017), Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019) and Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems (2020). His translation Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published in 2007, and his further medieval translations include The Death of King Arthur (2011) and Pearl (2016).

He has also written fiction, non-fiction, drama and work for broadcast. His novels include Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), while his non-fiction books include All Points North (1998), Walking Home (2012) and Walking Away (2015). His theatre work The Last Days of Troy was performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2014.

Armitage served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford from 2015 to 2019 and became Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds in 2017. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2018 and was named UK Poet Laureate in 2019. New Cemetery was published by Knopf on 20 January 2026.