Harrison, Tony (1937-…), is a British poet, playwright, and translator. Harrison’s most fruitful works exploit the social tensions between his working-class upbringing in a Yorkshire city and his later university education. His work is known for its wit, technical brilliance, and skill in the use of rhyme and everyday language. Harrison has also won recognition for his outspoken views on public affairs.
Harrison was born on April 30, 1937, in Leeds and studied classics and linguistics at Leeds University, graduating in 1958. He spent the years 1962 to 1966 lecturing in English at Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria. From 1966 to 1967, he was an English lecturer at Charles University, Prague, the capital of what is now the Czech Republic.
From his earliest poems, such as “Them and (uz)” and “On not being Milton,” Harrison’s work has given a poetic voice to those who have traditionally been without one. Through the controversial poem V (televised in 1985), Harrison made an explicit denunciation of the class system in the United Kingdom. Harrison also spoke up for the working class in his Gulf War poems, published in The Guardian newspaper in March 1991 and collected with other material in A Cold Coming: Gulf War Poems (1992). In 1992, Harrison won the Whitbread Award (now the Costa Literary Award) for poetry, one of the United Kingdom’s leading literary awards, with The Gaze of the Gorgon. In 1995, he narrated and directed his own poetic film, The Shadow of Hiroshima, broadcast to mark the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb.
Harrison’s other books of poems include The Loiners (1970), Palladas (1975), A Kumquat for John Keats (1981), Selected Poems (1984-1987), Permanently Bard: Selected Poetry (1995), and Laureate’s Block (2000). He is also internationally famous for some verse translations of plays including Greek tragedies; the English medieval mystery cycles, which dramatized stories from the Bible; and works by the French writers Jean Racine and Molière. Harrison’s play Square Rounds, a history of the development of bullets from their invention in ancient China up to World War I (1914-1918), was staged at the National Theatre, London, in 1992.
