As reported on booktrade.info, Armitage has won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize for 2010:

Simon Armitage's winning poem is called The Present. It is set in West Yorkshire, where Armitage lives. It was inspired by the very weak winter of 08/09 when his daughter wasn't very well and Simon went up on the moor in search of icicles, to cheer her up, and came back pretty much empty handed ....

... Simon Armitage says: "I'm not sure if it's possible to be a Romantic poet anymore, but more and more poets seem to be turning their eye towards nature. To the necessity of its otherness. It's hard to explain, but speaking personally, if the birds and the moors and the trees and the ice disappeared, then I would have no interest in writing about a city street, and probably no purpose as a poet."