He has also translated multiple early English works including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and worked on several history documentaries for the BBC. Awarded a CBE in 2010 for his services to poetry, Armitage is currently professor of poetry at Oxford University and Leeds University, and previously at Sheffield. Summing up the committee’s decision, Duffy praised Armitage as “boundary-breaking”, spinning “poems of emotional weight and musical grace from the fabric of our everyday lives”. “When you write poems you’re not always sure they are hitting the mark. “In decades and centuries gone by, the laureate role was a more remote and aloof position, but the world has changed and poetry has changed with it,” Armitage said.

Source: The Guardian December 19, 2018 15:56 UTC