Poet Laureate Simon Armitage breathes new life into some of literature’s greatest stories in this collection of BBC Radio re-imaginings.

Simon Armitage is one of the UK’s most prominent contemporary poets and writers, serving as Poet Laureate since 2019 and with a substantial body of work across poetry, theatre, translation and broadcast media. His longstanding relationship with the BBC includes original poetry, drama, documentary, travelogue and performance.

His translations and adaptations of classic works, particularly medieval and classical texts, have been widely praised for making complex or historically distant material accessible without losing poetic integrity. His version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has become a widely studied and commercially successful modern translation (published in print by Faber).

This collection brings together a selection of Armitage’s dramatised radio reimaginings of classic material, unified by a clear editorial thread: the reinterpretation of canonical stories for contemporary listeners. The selection spans medieval romance, classical epic, folklore and historical narrative.

Content:
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Bookclub: Simon Armitage
The Owl and the Nightingale
Missing Presumed Dead: The Odyssey
The Last Days of Troy
The Bayeux Tapestry

Cast includes Ian McKellen, Samuel West, Maxine Peake, Lily Cole, Rachael Stirling and Christopher Eccleston.