Fri, Feb 27, 5.00pm – Simon Armitage at Faversham Literary Festival, St Mary of Charity, Faversham ME13 8GZ. Earlybird tickets now available to Friends of the Festival only. On general release from 1pm, Dec 21

February 25 – March 6 – N to P Libraries Tour. 

Sat, March 7 – An Evening with Simon Armitage, The Helicon, Heaney HomePlace, 45 Main Street, Bellaghy, BT45 8HT. Tickets on sale from 10.00 on Dec 10.  19/12 – tickets 50% sold out, don’t wait to book. 

Wed, March 11, 7.30pm, Simon Armitage at Words by the Water, Main House, Theatre by the Lake, Keswick CA12 5DJ. Ticket booking from Jan 12.

Thurs, April 16, 7.30pm – Simon Armitage & LYR in Cambridge, Storey’s Field Centre, CB3 1AA. Tickets on sale.  

Broadcasts still available

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.