Simon Armitage turns Hansel & Gretel into a darkly glittering fairy tale for grown-ups. In vivid and trenchant language, he puts a contemporary spin on the tale we know from the Brothers Grimm. Here is a twenty-first century story, whose preoccupations are poverty and hunger, war and flight, a shifting dystopian landscape where nothing is quite as it seems. Text and illustration fuse beautifully to summon a nightmarish vision that nonetheless contains humour and humanity and the possibility of a more hopeful future to come.
Author
Simon Armitage, whose The Shout was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, has published ten volumes of poetry and has received numerous honors for his work. He was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 2019 Armitage's poetry collections include Book of Matches (1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995). He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on the north of England. He has produced a dramatised version of Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize), both of which were published in July 2006. Many of Armitage's poems appear in the AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) GCSE syllabus for English Literature in the United Kingdom. These include "Homecoming", "November", "Kid", "Hitcher", and a selection of poems from Book of Matches, most notably of these "Mother any distance...". His writing is characterised by a dry Yorkshire wit combined with "an accessible, realist style and critical seriousness."
