Magnetic Field

The large village of Marsden, West Yorkshire not only was home to Simon Armitage's beginnings as writer, but has continued as a vital presence throughout his works: from his very first pamphlet, Human Geography (1988), to his forthcoming new collection New Cemetery (scheduled for 2022). This edition gathers all the Marsden poems together to create a 'poetry of place' edition, which will offer a new way of appraising Simon's body of work, as well as celebrating this overlooked region that has meant so much to him personally. Simon will be announcing a decade-long tour of libraries in the UK as a central strand of his laureateship: every spring he'll be reading in a handful of libraries across the country, and would like to feature this collection as part of it, donating a copy to each library. Even in Marsden the extraordinary could happen, apparently. Staring out of that window every night I developed a new sense of the world, one that went beyond the factual and the informational. A sense of what it was like, and how it felt. That was the beginning of my life as a writer, even though I still didn't know how to capture experiences in words. - Simon Armitage in the Guardian, on growing up in Marsden.

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.