Click here to access the poetry recordings of Simon Armitage as well as a brief biography of this author.

Simon Armitage (b. 1963) burst onto the poetry scene with Zoom! in 1989 and quickly established himself as the most high-profile poet in the group dubbed 'The New Generation'. His most celebrated poems often take the form of monologue allowing him to don a variety of guises to probe serious issues of identity, class and masculinity. From this page, you can hear the voice of Simon Armitage reading three of his poems, "The Shout," "The Twang," and "You're Beautiful."

Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.

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