Simon Armitage: Magnetic Field

Main House Theatre  |  16 October 2021

Ended

Join us for a special evening of poetry with photographs as UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage reads live on stage from Magnetic Field, his recent collection inspired by the West Yorkshire village where he grew up and began life as a writer. Includes audience Q&A and book signing afterwards.

Celebrated as “the most popular and prolific British poet of his generation” (The Times), Armitage has published eleven poetry collections, two novels and three non-fiction bestsellers, All Points North, Walking Home and Walking Away. In 2018, he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

The poems in Magnetic Field range from the night-time view from Armitage’s bedroom window to the clockwork comings and goings in the village; the vastness of the surrounding moors always at his shoulder. Magnetic Field invites questions about the forging of identity, the precariousness of memory and the forces places can exert decades on.

Simon Armitage’s numerous accolades include an Ivor Novello Award for song-writing in the BAFTA-winning film Feltham Sings. He also writes extensively for television and radio, most recently BBC2’s A Pandemic Poem: Where did the World Go? and BBC Radio 4’s The Poet Laureate has Gone to his Shed. His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare’s Globe. Armitage is currently Professor of Poetry at Leeds University. His recent book A Vertical Art features his public lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry (2015-2019).

A poet whose work is ambitious, accomplished and complex as well as popular.
Sunday Telegraph
His verse is immediate, entertaining, engaged with the world.
Independent on Sunday
The poet of his generation.
Melvyn Bragg