Simon Armitage Audiobooks

The Poet Laureate walks the Pennine Way troubadour-style in Walking Home

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Who is Simon Armitage?

Simon Armitage, born in 1963, is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist, appointed Poet Laureate in May 2019 and professor of poetry at the University of Leeds. His first collection, Zoom!, appeared in 1989, and more than twenty others have followed, many rooted in his home town of Marsden in West Yorkshire – poems gathered in Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems.

His range is unusually wide even by laureate standards. He has translated medieval classics including Pearl, the Alliterative Morte Arthure and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, dramatised the Odyssey, edited anthologies including one on the work of Ted Hughes, and written travel books – among them Moon Country and Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way. Add a steady presence in television and radio documentaries, dramatisations and travelogues, and you have that rare thing: a serious poet with a genuinely public voice.

Simon Armitage in audiobooks

A poet’s ear makes for very good listening. Walking Home, the Armitage title in our catalogue, is his account of travelling the Pennine Way, troubadour-style, and it suits audio beautifully: the rhythm of walking and the rhythm of well-made sentences turn out to be close cousins. For a writer whose poetry has always been fed by the north of England, the terrain could hardly be more fitting, and UK listeners get the pleasure of hearing their own landscape observed by a professional noticer.

Those who arrive for the travel writing may well stay for the rest: a laureate who moves easily between medieval translation, radio and the road clearly hears language before he writes it.