Simon Armitage was born in Huddersfield in 1963. His awards include a Lannan Award and a BAFTA award. His most recent books from Faber (2006) are the poetry collection Tyrannosaurus Rex and The Corduroy Kid and a version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In 1996, Simon Armitage collaborated with Glyn Maxwell on Moon Country, which followed in Auden’s and MacNeice’s footsteps to Iselnad.

Praising Armitage as a public poet, Peter McDonald writes: ‘Any poet has to face the challenge of language’s debasement, and real poets do something about that debasement: in this sense, all good poetry is a public act. Armitage knows how to absorb the decay of meaning in much of what constitutes actual public speech by applying the special pressures and ironies only possible in poems.’

The following recordings were made at the Louis MacNeice Centenary Celebration and Conference at Queen's University, Belfast in September 2007.

The Christening

Listen Here

Song of the West Men

St Aidan's Day

'December'

© All recordings copyright Simon Armitage and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.

Simon was reading with Nick Laird and Richard Murphy.