An Evening with Simon Armitage

We're thrilled to welcome back Simon Armitage to the bookshop for an evening of conversation and readings from his upcoming collection New Cemetery.

Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. His award-winning collections include Seeing Stars (2010), The Unaccompanied (2017), Magnetic Field (2020), Blossomise (2023) and Dwell (2025). Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate.

New Cemetery is the highly imaginative and wide-ranging new collection from the Poet Laureate.

The conversion of a local beauty spot into a municipal graveyard is the starting point for New Cemetery. From regular walks around the boundary near his moorland home in West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage chronicles the extraordinary transformation of landscape both outer and inner.

These luminous and wry poems – composed in short-lined tercets – reflect the changing world: one of unstable weather patterns and unpredictable news events, all observed across a few acres of Pennine upland. As phases of lockdown come and go and the cemetery fills up with his new ‘neighbours’, Armitage charts personal losses of his own, often retreating to his garden shed to navigate blank paper with pen and ink – and the results are as surprising as they are life-enhancing.

Armitage has received numerous awards for his poetry including 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 1999 Armitage was named the Millennium Poet. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Armitage was awarded the CBE for services to poetry in 2010 and presented with the Hay Medal for Poetry at the 25th Hay Festival in 2012.