Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison's writing is characterised by an impassioned engagement with contradictions generated by his upbringing, education and familial relations. Born into a working-class family in Leeds, he attended Leeds Grammar School as a Scholarship Boy, and went on to study Classics at Leeds University. His early career was as a peripatetic academic and teacher. He began to publish poetry in the mid-sixties, his first poems appearing in a collection entitled Earthworks (1964) during a period when he was lecturing in Nigeria (1962-66). Although a self-consciously radical and proletarian writer whose political sympathies lie firmly with the class and community of his birth, he chose not to refuse conventional verse forms but instead em