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A book about the North. Simon Armitage's subjects include: a typical Saturday night out in West Yorkshire; Hebden Bridge - the hippy capital of the universe; watching Huddersfield Town on Saturday afternoon; and the electrified East coast line. Selected for World Book Day 2003 - England.

Brian Hill’s film is based on Armitage’s poem about a childhood prank that goes wrong, and then ends in mystery. Children find a huge tractor tyre up on the moors and begin rolling it. Inevitably, things get out of control and as the tyre cascades downhill towards their hometown they imagine the devastation it’ll wreak, and the trouble they’ll be in. But can it really be that nobody in town even saw the tyre?

From punk to mod to New Romantic, and eventually to acclaimed poet, Simon Armitage writes about a life where music and poetry have been core. And about a place, the village of Marsden in west Yorkshire, where he can stand and look out across a huge circumference of inspiration and influence: Joy Division, the Smiths and The Fall to the west, the Comsat Angels and Pulp to the south, Andrew Marvell and Larkin way out east, Ted Hughes and Plath just to the north. Gig is a warm, vivid, wonderful book about music, poetry, family and ...always ...the North.

Simon Armitage is one of the UK's most popular and critically successful poets. In Kid, his poems explore experiences of domestic tension, law and order and the human psyche. Great Sporting Moments analyses the social inequality of tennis with a wry humour.

Simon Armitage, an established poet, launched his fiction career with this tense story of four reunited friends attempting to recapture their 1970s childhood through a game of 'dares' that become increasingly extreme. Melvyn Bragg said in The Observer that the novel was written with 'the salty prose of an original poetic voice'.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight narrates in crystalline verse the strange tale of a green knight who rudely interrupts the Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager. The virtuous Gawain accepts, and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. Next Yuletide Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dream-like castle, a dire challenge answered, and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing. Simon Armitage's new version is meticulously responsible to the tact and sophistication of the original - but responsible equally to its own persuasive claims to be read as an original new poem. It is as if, 600 years apart, two northern poets set out on a journey through the same mesmeric landscapes - acoustic, physical and metaphorical - in the course of which the Gawain poet has finally found his true and long-awaited translator.

This flesh-and-blood account of numerous personal journeys reads like a private encyclopaedia of emotion and health. The poems range from the rainforests of South America to the deserts of Western Australia, but are set against that ultimate and most intimate of all landscapes, the human body.

These poems were written for a poem-film by Simon Armitage shown in the BBC 2 series Words on Film. The film is set on the Ashfield Valley Estate in Rochdale, Lancashire, which consisted of 26 alphabetically named flats. Ashfield Valley was in the process of being demolished as the poems were written and the film was being made.

Simon Armitage used to work as a probation officer, and his first posting as a raw recruit was to Rochdale, where his patch included Ashfield Valley. Xanadu is his personal and imaginative response to the ill-starred estate, using highly innovative and strangely unsettling poetry and film techniques, assisted by contributions from the last surviving Ashfield tenants - highly innovative and unsettling, hard-edged poetry. Dogs, snow and Hungarian dancers add further zest to Armitage's Xanadu.

An anthology of poetry published in Britain and England in the half-century since World War II. Poets include Edwin Muir, Kate Clanchy and the American-born T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath.