6 Tony Harrison, The Loiners Notebook, 1969-70

The leading contemporary poet to have been a student at Leeds is Tony Harrison who read Classics at the University in the late 1950s. His first publication Earthworks was published in 1960, with his first full book of poems The Loiners (a traditional name for inhabitants of Leeds) following in 1970.

Tony Harrison was born in Beeston in south Leeds in 1937. He was an early beneficiary of the 1944 Butler Education Act and won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School aged eleven.

In 1955, he became an undergraduate in the Classics Department, but soon came into contact with students in the Department of English Literature, including James Simmons and Wole Soyinka.