News at Eleven: Success, for a poet, just doesn't come bigger.

Except that he [Simon Armitage] didn't get the laureateship.

"I tried," he says, when I try to ask him if he cared, "to keep utterly out of it when it was all going on. It was like all this sort of thunder that was getting nearer, and I kept thinking, 'am I going to be struck by lightning?' and then it sort of passed over. I think," he says with disarming honesty, "if they'd offered it, I might have taken it, but probably for the wrong reasons. I think I would have been flattered, but actually it would have been a massive distraction. You know me, Christina, do you think I'm ready to take on the poetic responsibility of 60 million people? Because I don't."

from Independent: Simon Armitage: 'I'm quite boyish in my outlook'

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