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Multi-award-winning poet Simon Armitage talks to Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden and presents his latest collection, The Unaccompanied.

The poems in Armitage’s 11th volume are set against a backdrop of economic recession and social division and in a world where mass media and globalisation have made alienation commonplace. In it, Odysseus wanders the aisles of cut-price supermarkets looking for direction, and the star of Bethlehem rises over a post-industrial Yorkshire where the alarm bells of ailing communities fall on deaf ears.

Armitage is also a playwright, novelist, broadcaster and travel writer. In 2007 he published his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. He is professor of poetry at the University of Sheffield and in 2015 was appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry.  He is regarded as one of our greatest living poets.

Presented by the Bodleian Libraries.