In February 2020, the Labour MP Richard Burgon won cross-party support from 29 MPs – 27 Labour, 1 DUP and 1 SNP – for a House of Commons early day motion in praise of Tony Harrison, as a poet who had “always written, and spoken, for the people”. The citation praised work “fit to be ranked alongside Aeschylus and Shelley”, while pointing out that the same parliamentary machinery had been used, in 1987, in a failed attempt to ban a TV screening of Harrison’s long poem V on the grounds of obscenity.
One of the most political poets of the last century, Harrison, who has died aged 88, was also one of the most versatile. But he always insisted that all his work was “part of the same quest for a public poetry”.
A colossus of the rhyming couplet, Harrison dominated the National Theatre stage for more than a decade from the early 1970s, when the company was still based at the Old Vic, with rumbustious updatings of French classics. In 1973, he fast-forwarded Molière’s Misanthrope to Charles de Gaulle’s France, and two years later he transported Racine’s Phèdre to an India ruled by the British Raj, where it became Phaedra Britannica.
His triumphs in the National’s South Bank era included The Mysteries (1977), a three-play reworking of the medieval York, Chester and Coventry mystery cycles, in which a promenade audience watched God create the world with a forklift truck, and The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1990), based on fragments of a bawdy Sophocles play and featuring clog-dancing satyrs who leapt from archaeological shipping crates with what Michael Billington recalled as “toweringly erect phalluses”.
Harrison directed Trackers himself, insisting that between its premiere in Delphi and its National Theatre run, it was performed at Salts Mill, Saltaire, near Bradford, now a thriving arts centre but then a recently abandoned textile mill.
True to curmudgeonly form, Harrison regarded the performance both as a “homecoming” to his native Yorkshire and as part of a “slow burning revenge” against a teacher who he felt had discriminated against him because of his accent. He had already memorialised this slight in his most anthologised poem, Them & [uz]: “Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those / Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!”
Ambivalence about his origins animated Harrison’s work from the start. Born in Beeston, a working-class district of Leeds, he was the only child of Harry Harrison, a baker, and his wife, Florrie (nee Wilkinson-Horner). He won a scholarship to Leeds grammar school and went on to study classics at Leeds University. The gulf that this classical education created between him and his working-class family would become an enduring theme, inspiring some of his most deeply felt and sardonic poetry, including the much-quoted four-liner, Heredity: “How you became a poet’s a mystery! / Wherever did you get your talent from? / I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry – / one was a stammerer, the other dumb.”
Mourning his mother’s death, he modelled another poem around her observation that he and his father looked like a pair of bookends, sitting either side of the fire, remarking in Book Ends that “for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s / not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books”. His father’s death, some time later, inspired a sonnet, Marked with D, in which he recalled “The baker’s man that no one will see rise / And England made to feel like some dull oaf”.
He published his first poem, When Shall I Tune My Doric Reed (1957), when he was 19, in the university magazine, Poetry and Audience, which he went on to edit, running into the first of many controversies when he printed a James Kirkup poem scandalously titled, and featuring, Gay Boys.
At university, he also became involved in student revue, writing sketches, and performing at the Empire theatre alongside contemporaries including the future Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and the comedian Barry Cryer. Cryer later recalled forcibly holding Harrison down and smearing his hair with Brylcreem for a sketch that required him to play posh.
His friendship with Soyinka played a part in Harrison’s decision in 1962 to take a job at Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria. He was newly married to Rosemarie Crossfield, and their children, Jane and Max, were born there. He was joined by another Leeds contemporary, the poet James Simmons, with whom he collaborated on a Nigerian version of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, Aikin Mata, which was performed by local students. It was while he was in Nigeria that his first pamphlet, Earthworks, was published back in Leeds, as part of an imprint run by Jon Silkin and Andrew Gurr from the university English department.
After four years in Nigeria the family moved to Prague, where Harrison became an assiduous playgoer, seeing at first hand the power of classical drama in a society where news was censored – an experience he later described as “a really important part of my life”.
The family had returned to the north of England, and to the city that would become home for the rest of Harrison’s life, Newcastle upon Tyne, by the time his exuberantly rude debut collection, The Loiners, was published in 1970. It set out the ground plan of his life’s work with its blend of classical scholarship and scatalogical politics, winning him the Geoffrey Faber memorial prize.
His second collection, From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems (1978), announced his adoption of the Meredithian sonnet – which used 16 lines instead of the more familiar 14, and would become a signature form. “These sixteen lines that go back to my roots,” he wrote in the fine opening poem, On Not Being Milton, adding that it was a form that “Clangs a forged music on the frames of art, / The looms of owned language smashed apart”.
His predilection for “smashing apart” led to some predictable spats over the years, not least when his film poem V was screened on Channel 4 in 1987. Mary Whitehouse and the Daily Mail were among those who teamed up to condemn the poem, which set a sweary meditation on the class warfare of the miners’ strike in the Leeds cemetery where his parents are buried, their graves vandalised by a skinhead who – at the poem’s brilliantly unexpected climax – turns out to be Harrison himself.
In 1989 he joined the outcry about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with another film poem, The Blasphemers’ Banquet, and this time it was the archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie who stepped in, with a discreet note asking the BBC to withdraw it. The corporation declined.
After making television and theatre his stomping ground for two decades, in the 90s Harrison turned to newspapers, travelling to Bosnia to write for the Guardian about one of the 20th-century’s bloodiest wars. On 14 September 1995 the armoured car in which he was travelling survived random gunfire to arrive in the town of Donji Vakuf just as the Serbs were pulling out, following a deal that signalled the beginning of the end of the Bosnian war. The story goes that his response to his party’s safe delivery to their hotel was “Bugger it, I’ve got to write a poem”.
The Cycles of Donji Vakuf was beamed by satellite to the newsdesk in time to make the front page of the next morning’s paper. It’s a measure of Harrison’s sense of history, and the seriousness with which he took his journalistic mission, that the poem contains a clear echo of the journalist William Howard Russell’s newspaper report from Crimea in 1854, which inspired Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Harrison traced his preoccupation with war back to his childhood in Leeds when, as an eight-year-old in 1945, he saw newsreel footage of the Nazi camps and became obsessed with “how you could measure even simple pleasures against such images – when the violent events of history seem to cancel out joy and meaning”.
His association with the Guardian – where he was given a retainer and regarded as unofficial laureate – lasted on and off for more than a decade, from 1991 to the mid-noughties. He marked the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with two poems, one of which – Iraquatrains – urged readers to “Go round to Downing St, get Tony Blair’s hard disc” nearly two months before Andrew Gilligan sparked the “dodgy dossier” row on Radio 4’s Today programme.
Not all his journalistic interventions were war-related, however. In 1995, he wrote an anti-monarchist poem A Celebration of the Abdication of King Charles III, to which he returned four years later when he found himself mischievously tipped to be the next poet laureate. (The job went to Andrew Motion.) Though his salty anti-establishment views meant that in reality he was unlikely to find himself supping the laureate’s butt of sherry, he clung on to the idea through the title (and title poem) of his 2000 collection Laureate’s Block and Other Occasional Poems. It was widely panned, with one reviewer complaining that “Harrison cannot see beyond the rhyming couplet to what he is trying to say”.
But he was not one to let criticism get the better of him. In 2005 he published a new collection, Under the Clock, and in 2008, his use of language was back to top form when he returned to the National Theatre with a verse epic, Fram, which addressed environmental disaster, the failure of idealism and the saving power of imagination through the story of the Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, as told by the Greek scholar Gilbert Murray and the actor Sybil Thorndike.
He directed Fram himself, with the role of Thorndike played by his longtime partner and collaborator, Siân Thomas. He and Rosemarie had divorced in the 70s. His relationship with Thomas for a while ran concurrently with his second marriage, to the Canadian-Greek soprano Teresa Stratas. They met when he adapted the libretto for The Bartered Bride for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, married in 1984 and later divorced.
Thereafter, Thomas kept a flat in London while Harrison was mainly based in Newcastle, where – as he wrote in a birthday tribute to her in Laureate’s Block – “My life and garden, both transforming / thanks to you, and global warming, / started today to intertwine / tasting my first fig on the Tyne”.
Though he did not produce another poetry collection after Under the Clock, Harrison continued to publish individual poems in journals such as the London Review of Books, and his collected poetry was published in 2007. A sixth volume of plays was published by Faber in 2019. He was awarded the inaugural PEN/Pinter prize in 2009, and the David Cohen prize for a lifetime’s achievement in 2015.
His 80th birthday year saw an outpouring of activity, with a new play, Iphigenia in Crimea, broadcast on Radio 3, his prose writings gathered for the first time into a single volume, The Inky Digit of Defiance, and conferences on his work in Oxford and London. A day-long celebration at the British Academy unfolded like a Who’s Who of 20th-century broadcasting and theatre, with Vanessa Redgrave, Melvyn Bragg, Richard Eyre, Barrie Rutter and Lee Hall among those who paid homage and reprised some of his finest work.
Scholars from three continents flew in for the London celebration, with academic papers attesting to his international reputation, but it is to Leeds that he always insisted he would finally return, to rejoin his parents in Holbeck cemetery. In V, he even inscribed his own epitaph:
Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit.
Poetry supporter, if you’re here to find
How poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT
find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind.
He is survived by Siân, Jane and Max.
• Tony Harrison, playwright and poet, born 30 April 1937; died 26 September 2025
