Simon Armitage

Manchester Literature Festival is delighted to welcome back one of Britain’s leading poets and playwrights. A prolific writer, Armitage has published two novels, eleven collections of poetry including Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989 – 2014, Seeing Stars and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the non-fiction best-sellers All Points North, Walking Home and Walking Away. The Sunday Telegraph described him as ‘that rare beast: a poet whose work is ambitious, accomplished and complex as well as popular.’

Come and join the launch of his much-anticipated new volume of poems, The Unaccompanied. A bold and timely collection, The Unaccompanied is set against a backdrop of social division and economic recession, where mass media, the mass market and globalization has made alienation a commonplace experience and where the solitary imagination drifts and conjures.

Shaped by Armitage’s characteristic wit, insight and empathy, The Unaccompanied documents a world on the brink, where Odysseus stalks the aisles of cut-price supermarkets in search of direction and where the star of Bethlehem rises over industrial Yorkshire.