Harrison, Tony

Tony Harrison was born in Leeds in 1937 and grew up in Beeston, a suburb in the south-east of the city. His father was a baker and his mother a housewife. He attended his local junior school and, at the age of eleven, won a scholarship to the prestigious Leeds Grammar School. The school buildings were situated at this time close to Leeds University, where he went on to study Classics. After graduation he taught at universities in Nigeria and Prague during the 1960s. His first two volumes of poetry, The Loiners (1970) and The School of Eloquence (1978), explored issues of class and power, as well as, in the latter, his own often difficult relationship with his parents. He has worked extensively with the Royal National Theatre, which has mounted a number of productions based upon his translations of classic Greek and French drama. In 1987, a television programme by Channel 4 featuring a reading by the poet of his poem ‘v.’, which had been published in 1985, led to considerable controversy, mainly on account of the use of four-letter words in the poem. Subsequently, Harrison wrote a number of poems specifically intended for television, with the verse read in conjunction with film footage. These included The Shadow of Hiroshima (1995), which was set in the city on which the first atomic bomb was dropped forty years earlier, and The Blasphemers’ Banquet (1989), a defence of the principle of freedom of expression.

Harrison has always written extensively on war. He visited Bosnia during the conflict there in 1995 and has written poems about this situation. His 1991 poem ‘A Cold Coming’, commissioned by The Guardian newspaper, accompanied a photograph of the burnt corpse of an Iraqi soldier in the first Gulf War. In 2005 The Independent newspaper published a poem entitled 'Shrapnel', in which Harrison looks back to a bombing raid on Leeds in 1942, which affected his own area of Beeston. This was written in the aftermath of the ‘7/7’ bombings in London, two of the perpetrators having been from Beeston.