Simon Armitage

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.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

Occasionally it's been a long and bumpy road - one I'm still travelling - but I've always felt like my home town has been solidly behind me and I'm both grateful and proud.

In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself.

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.

I even feel guilty if I'm reading a novel, because I think I should be reading Homer again. I don't really know what free time is, because I don't have something to measure it against.

I once stood in the middle of New York city watching my name go round the electronic zipper sign in Times Square and I felt pretty thrilled, but not quite as thrilled as I felt when I saw my name in the 'Examiner' for the first time.