David Harsent is an English poet who for some time earned his living as a TV scriptwriter and crime novelist.
Background
During his early career he was part of a circle of poets centred on Ian Hamilton and forming something of a school, promoting conciseness and imagist-like clarity in verse, though his work has changed and developed a good deal since then. He has published twelve collections of poetry which have won several literary prizes and awards. Legion won the Forward Prize for best collection 2005 and was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot and Whitbread Awards. Night was triple short-listed for major awards in the UK and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Fire Songs won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2014. Sprinting from the Graveyard. his versions of poems written by the Bosnian poet Goran Simic while under siege in Sarajevo, appeared in 1997 and was adapted to opera, radio and television. In Secret, his versions of Yannis Ritsos, was published in 2012. His work in music theatre has involved collaborations with a number of composers and has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the Southbank Centre, The Proms, the Wiener Kammeroper, the Southbank Centre, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Holland Festival, and broadcast on BBC Two, Channel 4 and Trio. The Minotaur, opened at The Royal Opera House in 2008. Birtwistle once again turned to Harsent's words for his major song cycleSongs from the Same Earth and for the chamber operas The Corridor and The Cure.. The New York Times described Harsent and Birtwistle as a 'team creating alchemy'. Other words for music include operas Crime Fiction and In the Locked Room and When She Died, together with the song cycle Man Made: an early response to the climate crisis and an oratorio, The Judas Passion. Harsent is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Fellow of the Hellenic Authors Society. He was appointed Distinguished Writing Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University. In 2012 he was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.He left Bath Spa University in favour of The University of Roehampton in July 2013 after receiving an honorary degree. He lives with his wife, the actress Julia Watson, and their daughter in Barnes, London.
