Prior to mainstream publication, I published several limited edition pamphlets with small and local poetry presses, all now highly collectible. These included Human Geography, The Distance Between Stars, The Walking Horses, Around Robinson, and Suitcase.
My first full-length collection of poems, Zoom!, was published in 1989 by Bloodaxe Books. Further collections are Xanadu (1992, Bloodaxe Books), Kid (1992, Faber & Faber), Book of Matches (1993, Faber & Faber), The Dead Sea Poems (1995, Faber & Faber), Moon Country (with Glyn Maxwell, 1996, Faber & Faber), CloudCuckooLand (1997 Faber and Faber), Killing Time (1999 Faber & Faber), Selected Poems (2001, Faber & Faber), Travelling Songs (2002, Faber & Faber), The Universal Home Doctor (2002, Faber & Faber), Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (2006, Faber & Faber, Knopf 2008), and Seeing Stars (2010, Faber & Faber, Knopf 2011).
Throughout my career, I have also continued to work with smaller and specialised poetry presses. Publications of this type include The Anaesthetist (Prospero Poets, 1994), The Not Dead (Pomona Press 2008), Out of the Blue (Enitharmon, 2008) and the pamphlet The Motorway Service Station as Destination in its Own Right, published by the Poetry Business’s Smith/Doorstep Books in Sheffield (2009). The Twilight Readings is an illustrated publication of my residency at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2007, and includes several translated sections from the Wakefield Mystery Plays.
With Robert Crawford I edited The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945. Other anthologies include Short and Sweet, 101 Very Short Poems, and a selection of Ted Hughes’ poetry, both published by Faber & Faber.
I have received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes, a Lannan Award and the Keats- Shelley Poetry Prize. In 2012, at the 25th Hay Festival, I was presented with the Hay Medal for Poetry.
Zoom! was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Kid was short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Dead Sea Poems was short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Forward Prize and the T.S Eliot Prize. CloudCuckooLand was short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Both The Universal Home Doctor and Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid were short- listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Seeing Stars was short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. The Shout was short listed for the Nation Book Critics Circle Award (US).
In 1999 I was named the Millennium Poet and published the one-thousand line poem Killing Time.
I write for radio, television and film, and I am the author of four stage plays, including Mister Heracles, a version of the Euripides play The Madness of Heracles, and Jerusalem, commissioned by West Yorkshire Playhouse. My dramatisation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the BBC, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2004 and released on CD through BBC Worldwide. It received the Gold Award at the 2005 Spoken Word Awards. The book version, Homer’s Odyssey – A Retelling, is published by Faber and Faber (2006) in the UK and by Norton in the US. Other BBC radio plays include The Raft of the Medusa (2014) and Orpheus (2015). For over ten years I have been a regular guest of The Mark Radcliffe Show, first on BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2 and more recently on the Radcliffe and Maconie Show on BBC 6 Music.
My many contributions to BBC Radio 4 include his co-hosting of Armitage and Moore’s Guide to Popular Song and as a reviewer for the weekly arts programme Front Row. I am also a regular contributor to BBC 2’s The Review Show.
In 2011 I wrote Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster, the Radio 4 play which created unprecedented feedback and listener-response, was repeated soon after its original transmission and short-listed for the 2011 Ted Hughes Award. In 2012 it opened as a stage play at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre and has since been produced as a BBC film, directed by Sue Roberts. The poetic script of Black Roses was published in full by Pomona in 2012.
I have written for over a dozen television films, and with director Brian Hill pioneered the docu-musical format which lead to such cult films as Drinking for England and Song Birds. Song Birds was screened at the Sun Dance Film Festival in 2006. I received an Ivor Novello Award for my song-lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA. In 2009 and 2010, I presented films for BBC4 on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Arthurian Literature and on the Odyssey, sailing from Troy in Turkey to the Greek island of Ithaca.
I wrote the libretto for the opera The Assassin Tree, composed by Stuart McRae, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2006.
My first novel, Little Green Man, was published by Penguin in 2001. My second novel, The White Stuff was published in 2004. My other prose work includes the best-selling memoir All Points North, (Penguin 1998) which was the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year, and Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-Star Fantasist, in which I document my life-long passion for popular music and my role as lead singer and lyricist with the band The Scaremongers. The Scaremongers released their first album, Born In A Barn (Corporation Pop Records) in 2009; the same year they featured on BBC 2’s Culture Show and played Latitude Festival.
I have taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, as visiting professor at Falmouth University and as a senior lecturer Manchester Metropolitan University. As an Artist in Residence at London’s South Bank from 2009 to 2012 I conceived and curated Poetry Parnassus, a gathering of world poets and poetry from every Olympic nation as part of Britain’s Cultural Olympiad, a landmark event generally recognised as the biggest coming together of international poets in history.
The Shout, a book of new and selected poems was published in the US in April 2005 by Harcourt. It was short-listed for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. My highly acclaimed translation of the middle English classic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was commissioned by Faber & Faber in the UK and Norton in the US and published in 2007, and now appears in its entirety in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. A further medieval translation, The Death of King Arthur, was published by Faber and Norton in 2011, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the 2012 TS Eliot Prize. My translation of the medieval poem Pearl was published in 2016.
My 2012 non fiction book Walking Home, an account of my troubadour journey along the Pennine Way, was a Sunday Times best-seller for over a month and is shortlisted for the 2012 Portico Prize. The follow-up publication, Walking Away also made the Sunday Times best-seller list for non-fiction.
From 2010 and 2012, with letter-carver Pip Hall and landscape designer Tom Lonsdale, I worked on the Stanza Stones project, writing the sequence of poems In Memory of Water, the poems being carved into six stones at various sites along the South Pennine watershed between Marsden and Ilkley, now forming the 45 mile Stanza Stones Trail. The project was hosted by Ilkley Literature Festival. The mystery seventh stone, sited in an unnamed location, has yet to be found.
I have served as a judge for the Forward Prize, the T.S Eliot Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Griffin Prize, and in 2006 was a judge for the Man Booker Prize.
I am a Vice President of the Poetry Society, a Patron of the Arvon Foundation, a Patron of the Friends of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a Patron of the Wordsworth Trust, and Official Patron of the Elmet Trust. For my commitment and achievements in literature I have been awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Portsmouth, the University of Huddersfield, the Open University, Sheffield Hallam University and Leeds University. In 2004 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2010, for services to poetry, I was awarded the CBE.
In 2011, I was appointed Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield.
In 2015, I was elected as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
In 2017, I was appointed Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.
Awards and Honours
1988 Eric Gregory Award
1989 Zoom! made a Poetry Book Society Choice
1992 A Forward Poetry Prize for Kid
1993 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
1994 Lannan Award
1998 Yorkshire Post Book of the Year for All Points North
2003 BAFTA winner
2003 Ivor Novello Award for song-writing
2004 Fellow of Royal Society for Literature
2005 Spoken Word Award (Gold) for The Odyssey
2006 Royal Television Society Documentary Award Winner for Out of the Blue
2008 The Not Dead (C4, Century Films) Mental Health in the Media Documentary Film Winner
2010 Seeing Stars made a Poetry Book Society Choice
2010 Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry
2010 Awarded the CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, for services to poetry
2012 The Death of King Arthur made Poetry Book Society Choice 2012 Hay Medal for Poetry
2014 Cholmondeley Award
2017 PEN Award for Translation for Pearl