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Thurs, June 4, 7.00pm – An Evening with Simon Armitage, St Mary’s Arts Centre, Sandwich, Kent CT13 9HN – Tickets on sale. 

Sun June 7 – The Fall: Futures and Pasts – A Weekend celebration of 50 years of The Fall, Band on the Wall, Manchester M4 5JZ. Simon Armitage’s DJ session and in conversation event. Weekend passes on sale.

Sun, July 5, 10am – Family Lines: Rachel Bower & Simon Armitage, Ledbury Poetry, Community Hall HR8 2AE. Tickets on general sale open at 12pm on Friday 8^th May. For earlier access, join as a Friend.

Sat, July 25 – Simon Armitage at the Shack, WOMAD, then LYR at WOMAD, Neston Park, North Wiltshire. Tickets on sale. 

Broadcasts still available

BBC Radio 4, Artworks – Under a Cloud (2026)

The Poet Laureate Simon Armitage writes about clouds a lot. And coming from Marsden in West Yorkshire he grew up in them too. But he wants to bring clouds out of the background of his work and into the foreground – to consider why the floating grey blobs that ruin picnics hold such a fascination for artists. He’s always deployed them in his work as metaphors, but he’s learning from great artists that they can be inspriational as entities in their own right. They hold a particular grip on poets, and most of us know what Wordsworth wandered lonely as in his generational poetic banger “Daffodils”. Simon visits the poet’s home to browse Wordsworth’s notebooks and heads to The National Gallery to explore the meticulous approach of John Constable in The Haywain, which he developed in collaboration with the father of cloud classification, Luke Howard. And Simon considers how Joni Mitchell used them in her beautiful song “Both Sides Now”. Throughout the programme, we follow Simon on a nerve-wracking challenge, as he brings a boyhood ambition full circle. He’s in serious training. He’s going to present the weather, and as his slot for a recording of his bulletin just moments before the programme goes live nears, the tension builds…

BBC Radio 4, My Poetry and Other Animals (2024) 

The Poet Laureate Simon Armitage meets ten different animals (he makes eye contact with a tiger, holds a giant African land snail in the palm of his hand, stands in the middle of a room full of spiders, and tracks a fox) as he drafts a brand new poem across this series. Simon’s written a lot about animals in the past, but always at a distance. He wants that to change, and to feel that he has captured the spirit of an animal, and done it justice. Across different creaturely encounters, meetings with poets, and some of the most vivid poems about animals ever written (including Ted Hughes’ The Thought-Fox, William Blake’s The Tyger, Sharon Olds’ The Connoisseuse of Slugs, and Imtiaz Dharker’s The Host) Simon asks whether a poem can bring an animal closer to us, and if poetry can help us grasp what other animals really mean to our species, in an age when so many species are under threat.

BBC Radio 4, Larkin Revisited. Across ten programmes and ten Philip Larkin poems, Simon Armitage finds out what happens when he revisits and unpicks Larkin’s work in Larkin’s centenary year (2022, aired again 2025/6).

BBC Radio 4, The Poet Laureate has Gone to his Shed in which the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage talks to guests about life, language and music in his shed.

BBC Radio 4,The Ballad of Eldon Street – an unnatural history. A new form of radio ballad to mark the centenary of Radio Drama on the BBC. The story of this iconic Barnsley street told by the people who know it best, interwoven with specially composed songs written by LYR – Simon Armitage, Patrick J Pearson and Richard Walters.

BBC Radio 4, Poet Laureate in the Arctic. Considering himself a nature poet and with a geography degree, Simon Armitage pledged to put the environment at the heart of his thinking when he became Poet Laureate in 2019. In this 2023 series he travels to The Arctic to see for himself what’s going on in this part of the world which is so crucial to the climate change debate.