The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing will host award-winning poet and Holmes Visiting Professor Simon Armitage for a reading from his work on Wednesday, March 13 at 7:00 p.m. in the Hearst Dance Theater, followed by a reception in the Forum at the Lewis Arts complex in Princeton. The reading and reception are free and open to the public.
Simon Armitage, recipient of The Queens Gold Medal for Poetry for 2018. Photo by Paul Wolfgang Webster
Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in the village of Marsden and lives in West Yorkshire, England. His body of work spans poetry, translation, novels, nonfiction, and writing for film, theater, television, and radio. His full-length collections of poems include Zoom!, The Dead Sea Poems, CloudCuckooLand, The Universal Home Doctor, Seeing Stars, The Shout, and The Unaccompanied, among many others. His most recent publications include a revised illustrated edition of his acclaimed translation of the Middle English classic poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as well as a poetic script for the puppet opera Hansel and Gretel, forthcoming later this year. His prose work includes the novels Little Green Man and The White Stuff, the best-selling memoir All Points North and subsequent memoir Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-Star Fantasist, and the nonfiction books Walking Home and Walking Away. For over ten years, Armitage has been a regular guest on The Mark Radcliffe Show and is co-host of Armitage and Moore’s Guide to Popular Song.
Armitage was recently awarded The Queens Gold Medal for Poetry for 2018. His other honors include the 2017 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation, the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes, an Eric Gregory Award, a major Lannan Award, a Cholmondeley Award, the Spoken Word Award (Gold), the Ivor Novello Award for song-writing, BBC Radio Best Speech Programme, Television Society Award for Documentary, and Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds and Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.
In the current semester at Princeton, Armitage is teaching an advanced poetry course as a visiting professor of creative writing. The course gives undergraduate students advanced practice in the original composition of poetry and opportunities for discussion of poetry in workshop-style meetings.
For more information on the Program in Creative Writing and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of them free, visit arts.princeton.edu.
