Simon Armitage

"I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books."

"People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book."

"If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield."