Tony Harrison and the Classics comprises fifteen chapters examining the lasting importance of Tony Harrison's classical education, the extent of the influence of Greek and Roman texts on his subjects, themes, and styles, his contribution to knowledge and understanding of classical literature, his popularization of classical works, and his innovative treatment of classical drama in plays which have been performed globally. Harrison's work fosters debates about the role and perception of the classics and adaptations of classical literature in relation to education, 'high' and 'popular' culture, accessibility, and reception. A unifying theme of the collection is the way in which Harrison finds in classical literature fruitful matter for the articulation and dramatization of his longstanding preoccupations: language, class, access to art, and the causes and effects of war. Through his adaptations and translations, Harrison uses classical drama to stage interventions in modern politics, but neither idealizes nor romanticizes the ancient world, depicting inequality, bigotry, greed, and brutality.

This is the first book-length study of the classicism of Tony Harrison, one of the most important contemporary poets in England and the world. It argues that his unique and politically radical classicism is inextricable from his core notion that poetry should be a public property in which communal problems are shared and crystallised, and that the poet has a responsibility to speak in a public voice about collective and political concerns. Enriched by Edith Hall's longstanding friendship with Harrison and involvement with his most recent drama, inspired by Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, it also asserts that his greatest innovations in both form and style have been direct results of his intense engagements with individual works of ancient literature and his belief that the ancient Greek poetic imagination was inherently radical. Tony Harrison's large body of work, for which he has won several major and international prizes, and which features on the UK National Curriculum, ranges widely across long and short poems, plays, translations and film poems. Having studied Classics at Grammar School and University and having translated ancient poets from Aeschylus to Martial and Palladas, Harrison has been immersed in the myths, history, literary forms and authorial voices of Mediterranean antiquity for his entire working life and his classical interests are reflected in every poetic genre he has essayed, from epigrams and sonnets to original stage plays, translations of Greek drama and Racine, to his experimental and harrowing film poems, where he has pioneered the welding of tightly cut video materials to tightly phrased verse forms. This volume explores the full breadth of his oeuvre, offering an insightful new perspective on a writer who has played an important part in shaping our contemporary literary landscape.

A revised edition of Tony Harrison's award-winning Selected Poems This indispensable new selection of Tony Harrison's poems includes over sixty poems from his famous sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence and the remarkable long poem 'v.', a meditation in a vandalized Leeds graveyard which caused enormous controversy when it was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987 and is now regarded as one of the key poems of the late twentieth century. This substantially revised and updated edition now also features a generous selection of Harrison's most recent work, including the acclaimed poems he wrote for the Guardian on the Gulf War and then from the front line in the Bosnian War which won him the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry in 2007. Selected Poems is a collection to be savoured by fans of Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage and Sophie Hannah. 'A voracious appetite for language. Brilliant, passionate, outrageous, abrasive, but also, as in the family sonnets, immeasurably tender' Harold Pinter 'In the front rank of contemporary British poets. Harrison's range is exhilarating, his clarity and technical mastery a sharp pleasure' Melvyn Bragg 'The poem "v." is the most outstanding social poem of the last twenty-five years. Seldom has a British poem of such personal intensity had such universal range' Martin Booth 'Poems written in a style which I feel I have all my life been waiting for' Stephen Spender 'A poet of great technical accomplishment whose work insists that it is speech rather than page-bound silence' Sean O'Brien, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry

Tony Harrison: Loiner is published to celebrate the poet and playwright Tony Harrison's sixtieth birthday through an exploration of his work, including his best-known poem v.. Harrison (1937- ) has been called `our best English poet', and has been awarded a number of prizes for his poetry, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Royal Television Society Award, the Prix Italia, and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. This book gives his work the serious critical attention it merits, with essays from a number of prominent contributors, including Richard Eyre and Melvyn Bragg, and a foreword by Grey Gowrie. The collection ranges from personal recollections of working with Tony Harrison and personal responses to his poems, to detailed critical analyses of his techniques and themes, covering Harrison's short poems and sonnet sequence, his plays, his television poem-films, and his libretti, spanning the years 1955-1997. A `loiner' is a native of Leeds, where Tony Harrison was born and spent the early part of his life, and from which he was dispossessed by the enforced translation of the state scholarship system. The word also connotes other aspects of Tony Harrison: the `loins' of his poetry—its energy and physicality—and the `loners' who are its main protagonists—men and women dispossessed of their class, nation, language, and identity. At sixty, Harrison is at his poetic peak, producing plays, film-scripts, libretti, journalistic responses to social and national strife, impassioned speeches of love and outrage—always in poetry. Tony Harrison: Loiner introduces the major themes and forms of our most exciting and cosmopolitan as well as technically accomplished poet, and reassesses his achievement and place in twentieth-century literature.

Tony Harrison's sixth collection includes a foreword by Lee Hall. The book contains Harrison's translation of Euripides's Hecuba, which inaugurated the modern amphitheatre of Delphi in 2005; the remarkable Fram, which opened at the National Theatre in 2008; and Iphigenia in Crimea, after Euripides, which premiered on BBC Radio 3 to mark Tony Harrison's eightieth birthday in 2016.'Tony is that incredibly rare beast: as great a playwright as he is a poet.' Lee Hall 'I am convinced that Tony Harrison is one of the truly great poets writing in English today.' Melvyn BraggHecuba 'Harrison's urgent translation never lets us forget the aching topicality of Euripides' study of the powerful and the powerless.' Guardian Fram'Harrison brings gloriously rich life to the stage, by turns funny and rending. His couplets are a feast for rhyme junkies.' Financial Times'As visually resplendent a piece of theatre as you will see all year. The words more than hold their own, however, expressing in rhymes to be relished that poetry might yet, if not lead us out of the darkness, at least make us feel ashamed we're still stuck in it.' Sunday Times Iphigenia in Crimea Set in Sebastapol, 1854, inthe midst of the Crimean war, a lieutenant decides to stage an all-male production of Euripides's tragedy. After initial raucous incredulity, the atmosphere changes as the men commit themselves to the drama until, as it draws to a close, ancient and modern worlds collide and warfare resumes in earnest.

Tony Harrison's v. was written during the Miners' Strike of 1984-85 when he visited his parents' grave in a Leeds cemetery and found it vandalised by obscene graffiti. Channel Four's film of v. prompted extreme political and media reaction documented in the book's second edition (1989).