Armitage, Simon - Life

Simon Armitage

Regarded as the most important poet of his generation, he likes writing poems about ordinary people in a very ordinary and colloquial language which is, however, based on a careful choice of the precise word and make frequent use of imagery and metaphor. Simon Armitage was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire in 1953. He studied Geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic, and Social Work and Psychology at Manchester University. For some time he was a probation officer in Oldham, near Manchester. Armitage has taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop and has worked extensively in film, radio and television. He is now living in Marsden, West Yorkshire and is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2004 he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Armitage is one of the most prolific contemporary English writers; he has also written plays (Mr Hercacles, 2000, which is a translation of Euripides' Heracle) and prose works, although his most important production is in the field of poetry.

With this writer we have:
Zoom (1989)
Kid (1992)
Book of Matches
Dead Sea Poems
Killing Time
The Universal Home Doctor (2002)
Travelling Songs (2002)
All Points North
Little Green Man
The White Stuff (2004)

Armitage usually chooses to write about ordinary people; he often presents the facts of an ordinary situation and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions; he underlines the importance and wonder of ordinary things; he is also deeply concerned with social themes involving daily living and personal experiences, even including surgical operations; he likes analyzing people's motives and their mysterious reactions.