Peter Gill was born in 1939 in Cardiff and started his professional career as an actor. A director as well as a writer, he has directed over a hundred productions in the UK, Europe and North America. At the Royal Court Theatre in the sixties, he was responsible for introducing D. H. Lawrence's plays to the theatre. The founding director of Riverside Studios and the Royal National Theatre Studio, Peter Gill lives in London. His plays include The Sleepers Den (Royal Court, London, 1965), Over Gardens Out (Royal Court, London, 1968), Small Change (Royal Court, London, 1976), Kick for Touch (National Theatre, London, 1983), Cardiff East (National Theatre, London, 1997), Certain Young Men (Almeida Theatre, 1999), The York Realist (English Touring Theatre, 2001), Original Sin (Sheffield Crucible, 2002), Another Door Closed (Theatre Royal, Bath, 2009) and A Provincial Life (National Theatre of Wales, Sherman Cymru, Cardiff, 2011). Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, his collections of poetry include Seeing Stars (2010), The Unaccompanied (2017), Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019), Magnetic Field (2020) and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007). He writes extensively for television and radio, and is the author of two novels and the non-fiction bestsellers All Points North (1998), Walking Home (2012) and Walking Away (2015). His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare's Globe in 2014. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and, in 2018, he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate.
