Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Tapa dura

When a mysterious green knight arrives unbidden at Camelot one Christmas, only the young and inexperienced Gawain is brave or foolhardy enough to take up his challenge . . .

This story, first told in the late fourteenth century, is one of the most enthralling, enigmatic and beloved poems in the English language. Simon Armitage's version is meticulously responsive to the tact, sophistication and dramatic intensity of the original. It is as if, six hundred years apart, two poets set out on a journey through the same mesmeric landscape - physical, allegorical and acoustic - in the course of which the Gawain poet has finally found his true translator.

The poem's key episodes have been visualised into a series of bold, richly textured screen-prints by British artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. They are reproduced here, alongside Armitage's revised text, to create a special edition of this marvellous classic.

Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, he has published eleven collections of poetry, including Seeing Stars (2010), Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014 (2014) and The Unaccompanied (2017). He writes extensively for television and radio, and is the author of two novels and the non-fiction bestsellers All Points North (1998), Walking Home (2012) and Walking Away (2015). His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare's Globe in 2014. In 2015 he was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins is a British artist known especially for narrative paintings and artist's books. His paintings are represented in all the main public collections in Wales and across the UK, and his artist's books are found in libraries internationally. In 2011, the National Library of Wales held a retrospective exhibition, and Lund Humphries published a substantial monograph devoted to his work, in which Simon Callow called him 'one of the most individual and complete artists of our time'.