Simon Armitage

Our Patron

Our patron is Simon Armitage CBE, who was born in the village of Marsden and lives in West Yorkshire. He is the current Poet Laureate. 

Between 2010 and 2012, with letter-carver Pip Hall and landscape designer Tom Lonsdale, Armitage worked on the Stanza Stones project, writing the sequence of poems In Memory of Water, with the poems carved into six stones at various sites along the South Pennine watershed between Marsden and Ilkley, now forming the 45-mile Stanza Stones Trail. The project was hosted by Ilkley Literature Festival.

As well as writing poetry, Armitage is a novelist and playwright. He also writes for radio, television, film, and opera. and is a novelist and playwright.

In addition to being the patron of the Elmet Trust, Armitage is a Vice-President of the Poetry Society, a Patron of the Arvon Foundation, a Patron of the Friends of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and a Patron of the Wordsworth Trust.

For his commitment to and achievements in literature he has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Portsmouth, the University of Huddersfield, the Open University and by Sheffield Hallam University. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  • In 2010, Armitage was awarded the CBE for services to poetry.
  • In 2011 Armitage was appointed Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield, and is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. He was elected to serve as Oxford Professor of Poetry for 2015-2019.
  • In 2019, Armitage was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

You can read Simon Armitage’s full biography here.