Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire in 1963. His first two collections, Zoom! and Kid, which won the Forward Prize for best collection, established him as the leading poet of his generation in the U.K. He has now published nine collections, including Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (Knopf, 2008) and his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Norton, 2007), selected for the next edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Armitage has taught at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. His forthcoming collection, Seeing Stars, will be published in the UK by Faber & Faber in April 2010. He lives in Yorkshire, England. (updated 11/2009)