Simon Armitage gives special charity reading

Contact: 01782 734169 for tickets

Simon Armitage will give a special charity reading as part of Keele's 50th Anniversary Charter Year.

Simon is one of the country’s best-loved poets and was awarded a CBE for services to poetry in 2010. He is also a novelist and has written extensively for film, television and radio.

Join Simon for an evening of film footage, prose & poetry from his new bestselling memoir 'Walking Home', which describes his attempt to walk the Pennine Way as a modern troubadour. Travelling penniless, Simon relied on bartering poetry for his B&B and bacon butties while walking the 256 miles from north to south towards the Yorkshire village where he was born. Every night he gave free readings in churches, pubs and living rooms before passing round a walking sock and asking people to give him what they thought he was worth. As he discovered, this wasn't always cash! Simon will also read from his acclaimed translation of the medieval poem 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', which is associated with Lud's Church in the Staffordshire Moorlands. Books will be for sale and he will be available to sign them afterwards.

Carol Ann Duffy, who endowed the university's Roy Fisher Prize, has very kindly donated a bottle of Poet Laureate from her 'butt of 'sack', the traditional payment to the Laureate started by James I in 1619.

All proceeds from the reading & sherry raffle will go to a hospital-based cancer charity.

Price: £5.00 / £2.50

Time: 7:30pm