Selected Poems (Broché)

Biographie de Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison was born in Leeds in 1937. He spent four years in West Africa and a year in Prague before returning to Britain to become the first Northern Arts Literary Fellow in 1967-68, a post he held again in 1976-77. He now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. His collection of poetry include The Loiners, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1972; Continuous; v., which was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987, winning the Royal Television Society Award; A Cold Coming (Gulf War poems written for the Guardian); The Gaze of the Gorgon (Bloodaxe Books), which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1992; Selected Poems; Laureate's Block; and the Pocket Penguin Under the Clock.
He also contributed a selection of poems to Volume 5 of the Penguin Modern Poets series. Two audio cassettes of Tony Harrison reading selections of his poems have been released, one, v. and Other Poems, in 1997 by Penguin/Faber & Faber, and a second in 1998 by Bloodaxe Books. Recognized as Britain's leading theatre and film poet, Tony Harrison has written extensively for the National Theatre, the New York Metropolitan Opera, the BBC and Channel 4.
His Dramatic Verse 1973-1985 (Bloodaxe Books) collects verse drama, opera libretti and music theatre, including his National Theatre version of Aeschylus's Oresteia, which won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1982. The Mysteries (Faber), his acclaimed adaptation of the medieval English Mystery Plays, premiered at the National Theatre in 1985, and his play, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, which was directed by the poet, was first performed in the ancient stadium of Delphi in 1988, appeared at the National Theatre in 1990 and also toured in Europe.
Square Rounds, his original play for the National Theatre, had its premiere in 1992. Since then he has written and directed three new plays at special performance spaces: Poetry of Bust (Salts Mills, Saltaire, Yorkshire; 1993), The Kaisers of Carnuntum (the ancient Roman amphitheatre Carnuntum, Austria; 1995) and The Labours of Herakles (on the hillside site for the new theatre of Delphi, Greece; 1995).
These are published as Plays 3 by Faber & Faber (1996), who also publish his new translation of Victor Hugo's The Prince's Play, which opened at the National Theatre in April 1996. Among his many television films are Arctic Paradise, The Big H, the four-part BBC series Loving Memory; and his film poems, The Blasphemers' Banquet and The Gaze of the Gorgon. His film Black Daisies for the Bride won the Prix Italia in 1994 and an award from the Mental Health Media.
His film/poem A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan was specially commissioned for the anniversary of Democracy in 1994 and The Shadow of Hiroshima in 1995. His film/poem texts are collected in The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film Poems (Faber, 1995), which won the 1996 William Heinemann Prize. In 1995 he was sent by the Guardian to Bosnia and he wrote poems on the conflict for the front page. His most recent film, Prometheus, was premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 1998, and went on general release in 1999.
The screenplay is published by Faber & Faber.