Celebrated poet and playwright Tony Harrison will be marking his 80th birthday on 30 April with a reading at Salts Mill, Saltaire, near Bradford. Leeds-born Harrison is regarded as one of Britain’s foremost verse writers. Thirty years ago his poem ‘v.’, about the desecration of his parents’ graves by football hooligans, was broadcast on Channel 4 and became the centre of a media controversy, with tabloid newspapers, broadcasting campaigner Mary Whitehouse and some Conservative MPs describing it as obscene. It is now studied in schools.

In an interview with the Yorkshire Post Harrison said: “I don’t like going over my past work. I’d rather forget about it once it’s done. I prefer to think of every stage of my life as creative, I’d rather be doing something new.”

He says in the interview that he is currently working on a new poem which “has got longer than I thought it would be”, inspired by his stay in Killingbeck hospital in Leeds when he had scarlet fever as a young child in 1944 towards the end of the war. “I was there over Christmas,” he says. “I remember that they used to put lists in the newspaper to let the mothers know when they should come and fetch you.”

Of his reading at Salts Mill he said: “I knew that for my birthday I wanted to do a reading in Yorkshire and the mill has been a really important part of my artistic life. There are some wonderful associations.”

Background: Dave Morgan on Tony Harrison, 'v.',  and ‘the commodification of outrage’