Tony Harrison

Adaptation of the English Medieval Mystery Plays, based on the York and Wakefield cycles, The Mysteries, were first performed in 1985 by the Royal National Theatre.[2] Interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for BBC television in 2012, Harrison said: "It was only when I did the Mystery Plays and got Northern actors doing verse, that I felt that I was reclaiming the energy of classical verse in the voices that it was created for."[6]

One of his best-known works is the long poem "V" (1985), written during the miners' strike of 1984–85, and describing a trip to see his parents' grave in Holbeck Cemetery in Beeston, Leeds, 'now littered with beer cans and vandalised by obscene graffiti'. The title has several possible interpretations: victory, versus, verse, etc. Proposals to screen a filmed version of 'v.' by Channel 4 in October 1987 drew howls of outrage from the tabloid press, some broadsheet journalists, and MPs, apparently concerned about the effects its "torrents of obscene language" and "streams of four-letter filth" would have on the nation's youth. Indeed, an Early Day Motion entitled "Television Obscenity" was proposed on 27 October 1987 by a group of Conservative MPs, who condemned Channel 4 and the Independent Broadcasting Authority. The motion was opposed only by MP Norman Buchan, who suggested that fellow members had either failed to read or failed to understand the poem. The broadcast went ahead and, after widespread press coverage, the uproar subsided. Gerald Howarth MP said that Harrison was "Probably another bolshie poet wishing to impose his frustrations on the rest of us". When told of this, Harrison retorted that Howarth was "Probably another idiot MP wishing to impose his intellectual limitations on the rest of us".[7]

Richard Eyre calls Harrison's 1990 play, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus "among the five most imaginative pieces of drama in the 90s". Jocelyn Herbert, famous designer of the British theatrical scene, comments that Harrison is aware of the dramatic visual impact of his ideas: "The idea of satyrs jumping out of boxes in Trackers is wonderful for the stage. Some writers just write and have little idea what it will look like, but Tony always knows exactly what he wants."[8]

Edith Hall has written that she is convinced that Harrison's 1998 film-poem Prometheus is "artistic reaction to the fall of the British working class" at the end of the twentieth century,[9][10] and considers it as "the most important adaptation of classical myth for a radical political purpose for years" and Harrison's "most brilliant artwork, with the possible exception of his stage play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus".[9]

Professor Roger Griffin of the Department of History at Oxford Brookes University, in his paper The palingenetic political community: rethinking the legitimation of totalitarian regimes in inter-war Europe, describes Harrison's film-poem as "magnificent" and suggests that Harrison is trying to tell his audience "To avoid falling prey to the collective mirage of a new order, to stay wide awake while others succumb to the lethe of the group mind, to resist the gaze of modern Gorgons".[11]

• 1972 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (for The Loiners 1970)
• 1983 European Poetry Translation Prize (Aeschylus's The Oresteia 1981)
• 1982 Whitbread Prize for Poetry (The Gaze of the Gorgon 1992)
• 2004 Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award
• 2007 Wilfred Owen Poetry Award[19]
• 2009 PEN/Pinter prize, inaugural award.[20]
• 2010 European Prize for Literature
• 2014 European Poetry Prize
• 2015 David Cohen Prize[21]

• Quotations related to Tony Harrison at Wikiquote
• Tony Harrison on Bloodaxe Books website
• Tony Harrison at British Council: Literature
• Tony Harrison on the Faber and Faber website
• Guardian newspaper interview (March 2007)
• University of Leeds profile
• New Statesman profile (April 1999)
• Archival material at