Tony Harrison was born in Leeds and was educated at Leeds Grammar School and this University where he read Classics and took a diploma in Linguistics. A working class background and a passion for classical literature have been the foundation stones of his remarkable career as a poet. His work in the theatre, the concert hall, in film and in books is always the work of the poet because as he says himself ‘poetry is all I write’. His first collection of poems, The Loiners, was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1972. This year, he has won the Northern Rock Foundation’s Writers Award.

In 1977 he became resident dramatist at the National Theatre and his work there included Racine’s Phaedra Britannica and Moliere’s The Misanthrope. This erudite translation of Moliere for the theatre director John Dexter in 1981 was a great success and its earthy style has influenced many subsequent translators. In 1983 his acclaimed version of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia won him the first European Poetry Translation Prize and in 1985 his adaptation of the English Medieval Mystery Plays cycle was first performed at the National Theatre.

But many of his subsequent plays have been staged in ‘non-velvet’ theatres; The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus was premiered at the ancient stadium at Delphi in 1988; Poetry or Bust at Salts Mill, Saltaire in 1993; The Kaisers of Carnuntum at the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Carnuntom in Austria; and The Labours of Herakles on the site of the new theatre at Delphi in 1995.

This pioneering approach to bringing his poetry to new audiences went even further when Tony Harrison began to work in film. My own enthusiasm for his work began as a consequence of watching a TV programme and being captivated by the sound of a voice floating over the documentary creating more powerful images than I was seeing on the screen.. What surprised and delighted me was that it was a Northern voice which seemed to release poetry from being the preserve of the educated elite and put it within the reach of everyone. The words and the documentary had been created by Tony Harrison.

All his later films use poems and verse narrated by the author and include the moving and memorable ‘V’, broadcast by Channel 4 Television in 1987 and winner of a Royal Television Society Award; The Gaze of the Gorgon; The Shadow of Hiroshima and Black Daises for the Bride winner of the Prix Italia in 1994. He wrote and directed his first full length feature film, Prometheus, in 1998.

As a poet, he writes both as a private and as a public figure. His sonnets in ‘The School of Eloquence’, which explore his relationship with his family, have been hailed as some of the finest poetry written. But social injustice, war and capitalism, are all issues on which he writes fearlessly and powerfully. One might imagine that his concerns about these issues would lead him to be a pessimist, but I will let the poet himself speak. He once said: ‘When I look around me I sometimes feel a sense of despair but as a poet I listen to my heart and my heart tells me man was not made to despair, the head despairs the heart affirms’.