I am a poet, playwright, journalist, broadcaster, editor and critic. I grew up in Hull, read English at Cambridge and have lived in Newcastle since 1990. I have been Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University since September 2006.

My collections of poetry have received awards including the Somerset Maugham, the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Forward Prize, which I won for the second time with Downriver (Picador, 2001). In 2001 I was Northern Writer of the Year. In 2002 Picador published Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001. I won a third Forward Prize for a single poem, Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright, in 2006. The poem will be featured in a new collection, The Drowned Book, which is due to be published by Picador in autumn 2007.

My most recent poetry publication is a new verse version of Dante's Inferno, the first volume of which was published by Picador in October 2006. I plan to start work on translating the second volume of The Divine Comedy in 2007.

In 2000 Live Theatre Newcastle staged my political tragedy in verse, Laughter When We're Dead, which was then broadcast by Radio 3, as was The Black Path, written with Julia Darling. In 2002 my new version of Aristophanes' The Birds was staged at the National Theatre. Keepers of the Flame, a Faust-play about poetry and Fascism, was produced at Live Theatre in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the RSC's Newcastle season in November 2003.

The Deregulated Muse, my book of essays on contemporary poetry, was published by Bloodaxe in 1998, when Picador published my anthology The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945. I am poetry critic of The Sunday Times and write regularly for the TLS, as well as contributing to The Guardian and The Independent.

I have made numerous programmes for Radio 3 and 4. My television work includes the poem-film Bad Language (Channel 4, 1997) and a profile of Simon Armitage, The Poet Who Left the Page, for BBC 4 (2002).

I have read my work all over the UK and overseas, and have taught many writing courses for organisations such as the Arvon Foundation, as well as acting as a writers' mentor for New Writing North and an adjudicator for awards including the TS Eliot, the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize. I have held a number of Fellowships and residencies, including the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship (1992-94), Fellow in Creative Writing at Dundee University (1989-91) and Leeds University (1999). From 2001-03 I was writer in residence at Live Theatre, with Julia Darling. In 1996 and 1997 I was British Council Visiting Writer at the University of Odense (Denmark) and Hokudai University (Japan).