Hansel & Gretel

Simon Armitage turns Hansel & Gretel into a darkly glittering fairy tale for grown-ups. In vivid and trenchant language, he puts a contemporary spin on the tale we know from the Brothers Grimm. Here is a twenty-first century story, whose preoccupations are poverty and hunger, war and flight, a shifting dystopian landscape where nothing is quite as it seems. Text and illustration fuse beautifully to summon a nightmarish vision that nonetheless contains humour and humanity and the possibility of a more hopeful future to come.

Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. His collections of poetry, which have received numerous prizes and awards, include Seeing Stars (2010), The Unaccompanied (2017), Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019), Magnetic Field (2020) and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007). He writes extensively for television and radio, and is the author of two novels and the non-fiction bestsellers All Points North (1998), Walking Home (2012) and Walking Away (2015). His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare's Globe in 2014. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and, in 2018, he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate.