Poet in residence at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

He will visit the Bretton park throughout each season, creating new work to be published in the autumn in a pocketsize poetry guide. The 53-year-old, who was born in Marsden and has headlined Wakefield Lit Fest, will also curate a series of readings and events.

Armitage was born in 1963 in the West Yorkshire village of Marsden. He studied Geography at Portsmouth University. As a post-graduate student at Manchester University his MA thesis concerned the effects of television violence on young offenders and until 1994 he worked as Probation Officer in Greater Manchester. His first full-length collection of poems, Zoom!, was published in 1989 by Bloodaxe Books and he published The Twilight Readings, an illustrated publication of his earlier residency at YSP, in 2007. In 2015 Armitage was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.