Tony Harrison, the award-winning poet and dramatist whose writings fuelled national conversations about class, obscenity and politics, has died at the age of 88, his publisher has confirmed.
Harrison, a major voice in British poetry since he published his first collection in 1964, wrote front-page dispatches for the Guardian from the Bosnian war, and scandalised the nation with his 1985 poem V. Written after football hooligans desecrated his parents’ gravestones, the expletive-laden work was described as a “torrent of filth” by the Daily Mail when it was broadcast on Channel 4, prompting an early-day motion in the Commons. It is now studied in schools.
Harrison grew up in a working-class family in Leeds, winning a scholarship to Leeds grammar school and studying classics at the University of Leeds. His poetry explored the tension between his working-class background and the arts, from the teacher who mocks him in Them & [uz] – “You’re one of those / Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!’” – to the resulting separation he felt from his parents due to his education. In the poem Book Ends, he wrote of how he felt unable to talk to his father on the night of his mother’s death: “Back in our silences and sullen looks, / for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s / not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.”
In 1962, his friendship with Nobel laureate and fellow Leeds graduate Wole Soyinka contributed to his moving to Nigeria, where he wrote the play Akin Mata, a version of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata with African music and dance, and published his first poetry pamphlet, Earthworks, in 1964. Returning to Britain in 1967, his first collection The Loiners won him the Geoffrey Faber memorial prize in 1970.
His 1973 adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope was his big break at the National Theatre. Adaptations of The Oresteia and The Mysteries would follow, as did original productions Phaedra Britannica, Bow Down and The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, which was based on fragments of a Sophocles play. But though his career would span theatre, opera, film, television and print, Harrison preferred to be regarded as a poet. “I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. Poet covers it all for me,” he told the Guardian in 2015, after winning the David Cohen prize. “I want to do justice to my inwardness, my tenderness, my political rage.”
In 1987, when Richard Eyre’s film of V was broadcast, Harrison became renowned as a public poet, and a fearlessly political one, making headlines again two years later for his film-poem The Blasphemers’ Banquet, which was prompted by the fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie and led to the Archbishop of Canterbury asking the BBC to withdraw it. In his 1999 film-poem Prometheus, the story of the titan who stole fire from the gods to give to humans, Harrison reframed this act as an example of class warfare, with Yorkshire miners facing up to Zeus and Hermes, who are agents of capitalism.
In 1995, the Guardian sent him to Bosnia to cover the war. A poem written while travelling in an armoured vehicle outside Sarajevo made the paper’s front page. “Why shouldn’t poetry address what happened yesterday, and be published in the newspaper?” he told the Guardian 20 years later in a 2007 interview. “Yes, I’ve got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honour that as well.” His 2003 poem Iraquatrains, published a month before the “dodgy dossier” scandal became public, urged readers to: “Go round to Downing St, get Tony Blair’s hard disc.”
Harrison rejected establishment attempts to bestow accolades on him, calling honours “the nature of British life. It’s horrible.” When named as a possible contender for the poet laureateship in 1999, he made his feelings clear in a poem in the Guardian, titled Laureate’s Block. Harrison wanted, he wrote, to remain “free to write what I think should be written / free to scatter scorn in Number 10 / free to blast and bollock Blairite Britain”. He also took a swipe at the monarchy: “There should be no successor to Ted Hughes... / Nor should Prince Charles succeed our present queen / And spare us some toady’s ode on coronation.”
The current laureate, Simon Armitage, however, has spoken of how Harrison blazed a trail. “He has allowed my generation to do our own thing without having to worry too much about where we come from and what accents we’ve got,” said Armitage in 2000. “Trying to write in a way that’s representative of our voices was a pitched battle for him.”
Speaking in 2000, Harrison said that he hoped “the people who knew me will talk about me over a bottle of wine after I’ve gone”. “But what I’m proud of is that I can read poems about my parents in Leeds or Bradford, and men especially are suddenly sobbing in the audience. That a short poem has touched them that deeply and brings that kind of response is better than a rave review,” he said, going on to ruminate on his own inspiration.
“I always feel, especially in my fallow periods, that I don’t recognise this monster who finishes my work with such intensity. It’s like Rumpelstiltskin coming in and turning all the straw into gold and then going away again. I’ve done poems for the page, the stage, the opera house, television, film and newspapers. It’s all one work. You know, maybe the life is really about dodging about to achieve moments where the work can happen. And often you fuck up your life in order to get that moment. But that’s the way it can be when the muses have your telephone number.”
