Andrew is the trust's poetic voice

The man behind bringing some of the finest poetic voices around to Lakeland is the trust's literature officer Andrew Forster, himself renowned for a swift stanza or two.

"When I first read the work of Simon Armitage I felt a real jolt of recognition,” says Andrew. “Simon and I are about the same age, both from Yorkshire and have had some similar experiences and I really felt that this was the poetry I wanted to write.”

Ted Hughes was another important figure in Andrew’s development as poet: “Especially his poem The Thought Fox. It was important for me to read and hear northern voices in poetry. It helped me feel my own voice and accent was a legitimate one for writing poetry in.”

Andrew has three books in print, his latest, Homecoming, is on the Lakeland book of the Year shortlist.

And his finely crafted verse is so highly thought of that his poems are included in the GCSE syllabus.

"I was unsure about it at first as I didn’t write the poems for students to have to answer questions about them in exams. But I get lots of emails from students and I have really enjoyed the way they respond to the poems. It also led to me taking part in the Poetry Live readings which have been brilliant. I spent my 50th birthday reading to 1,200 students in Nottingham with Carol Ann (Duffy), Simon (Armitage), John Agard and others on the syllabus.

"As a poet my ambition has always been to keep trying to get better. I want to push my poems on to the next stage, to try new things, to give them more of charge, and to try and get a wider readership for them."

His first full-length collection, Fear of Thunder, was published in 2007 and was shortlisted for the 2008 Forward Prize: Best First Collection: "That was a very pleasant surprise. I’d just moved to Cumbria and was in the middle of unpacking, without internet access, and a friend texted me to say he’d seen it in the Guardian. Sales shot up during the shortlisting period and I suspect the GCSE inclusion wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t brought the book to people’s attention."

Andrew was born at Rotherham, in south Yorkshire, but he lived in Scotland for most of his working life. He landed a first at what was then the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education, now Roehampton University, in London. More recently he took an MA in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

"I didn’t really come to poetry until my early twenties and have no real recollection of doing very much of it at school, but I have always loved music and although I listen to lots of different kinds I still do love the work of singer songwriters where the lyrics seem to be important both for the meaning and the way they seem to dictate the melody and rhythm.

"I’m thinking particularly of people like Bob Dylan and I now understand I enjoyed poetic techniques without necessarily knowing that is what I was enjoying.

"I remember almost wandering in to the launch to an anthology called The Best of Scottish Poetry in the Edinburgh Book festival and really enjoying the power of an unaccompanied speaking voice. I bought the book and went on to read other books by the poets in there whose work I liked.

"Around the same time I started to go to a local creative writing class. I expected to write short stories but ended up writing short pieces that were a bit like poems. Writing these set me off on exploring in more detail what poetry was and why it worked."

Andrew's first job in the arts was teaching creative writing for a range of organisations, such as the Workers Educational Association and community education teams in various regions. This widened out into working on education projects with other artists and he did a number of projects with museums: "I then took up a post as literature development officer for Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association, working on literary activity all over the region. I did that for five years. I initiated a lot of things but I’m very proud of the Wigtown Poetry Competition which I took from initial idea to realisation, as way of promoting the Scotland’s Book Town as a literary place, and which is still going strong."

The Wordsworth Trust beckoned in 2008.

"I regularly came to the Lakes on holiday when I was working in Dumfries and Galloway, and had talked wistfully about moving down here but it didn’t seem possible. I came down to Carlisle for a reading at Tullie House by the poet Katherine Gallagher, who’d been a tutor of mine years before. I was early and bought the Cumberland News to pass the time. I saw the post advertised. I applied - and here I am."

As well as Armitage and Hughes, Andrew also admires the work of American poet Elizabeth Bishop, "and more and more I’m reading Seamus Heaney. At the moment I am being blown away by Tim Liardet, and I love the work of Liz Berry and Helen Mort."

Andrew says he keeps a journal and aims to write in it most days: “This gives me the raw material which ends up in the poems but it’s a strange process really. I tend to jot down a note about something I’ve seen or done, it might be a memory - and realise there may be a poem in it somewhere. I write poems over fairly long periods, weeks, months sometimes, and it often takes a few drafts before it really starts to resemble a poem, let alone before it’s finished."

To book tickets for Simon Armitage telephone 015394-35544.