Key Highlights
- “I find it very daunting,” he said.
- “I’ve lost friends and family to cancer.”But when he was commissioned to write a poem to mark World Cancer Day, he was forced to confront the realities of the disease.
- “I think I saw part of my task as being slightly demystifying and maybe de-mythologising or de-demonising cancer a little bit to myself,” Armitage said. He was asked to write the poem, titled The Campaign, by Yorkshire Cancer Research, a charity that funds research and works with people affected by cancer across his native Yorkshire.“My initial thoughts, as with every commission, is that I can’t do this, don’t really know where to start,” Armitage said.
- “But that’s the challenge really, and I like the idea that the subject is the sort of puzzle, and the poem is the solution.”In Yorkshire, someone is diagnosed with cancer every 17 minutes.
- Before writing the poem, Armitage met with 17 people from across Yorkshire – researchers, families, fundraisers and people living with cancer – at the Yorkshire Cancer Research centre in Harrogate.“The thing that really galvanised everything for me was spending time at the centre,” he said.
