Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in West Yorkshire and has published nine volumes of poetry. His awards include one of the first Forward prizes, the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year and a major Lannan Award. His most recent collections are Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (Faber & Faber, 2006), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and his translation of the classic Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Faber & Faber/Norton, 2007)He writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays. His dramatisation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the BBC, received the Gold Award at the 2005 Spoken Word Awards. He has also received the Royal Television Society Arts Documentary Award. Simon Armitage has written over a dozen television films, and with director Brian Hill pioneered the docu-musical format. He received an Ivor Novello Award for his song-lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA, and was the librettist for the opera The Assassin Tree, composed by Stuart McRae, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2006. He has published two novels as well as the best-selling memoir All Points North (Penguin, 1998), which was the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year. He is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.