Simon Armitage was born in Marsden, a village in West Yorkshire, England. He earned a BA from Portsmouth University in geography, and an MS in social work from Manchester University, where he studied the impact of televised violence on young offenders. He worked as a probation officer for six years before focusing on poetry. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and in 2017 he was appointed Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. He was named UK Poet Laureate in 2019. The recipient of numerous honors and awards, Armitage was named the Millennium Poet in 1999, a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature in 2004, and a Commander of the British Empire in 2010. In 2014 he was awarded the Cholmondeley Award.
Known for his deadpan delivery, Armitage’s formally assured, often darkly comic poetry is influenced by the work of Ted Hughes, W.H. Auden, and Philip Larkin. As a reviewer for the PoetryArchive.org observed, “With his acute eye for modern life, Armitage is an updated version of Wordsworth’s ‘man talking to men.’”