As a region, Yorkshire has birthed many great writers- playwrights, poets and authors, who have written works that have shaped the literary canon. Some texts are revered today as classics, but all of these writers have been influenced by their background in their work.

Our current national poet laureate, Simon Armitage was born in Huddersfield and raised in Marsden, located in West Yorkshire. Today he is recognised as one of the greatest poets of our time and has published both poetry and prose. His poetry collections, including Kid, Travelling Stars and Book of Matches, draw upon his experiences growing up in Yorkshire, exemplified in poems such as The Shout and To the women of the Merrie England coffee houses, Huddersfield. In particular, the collection Zoom, in Armitage’s words, magnified everyday life in semi-rural West Yorkshire, bringing into context an insight into the normalities and trivialities of life growing up in the local region.

James Herriot (birth name James Alfred Wight) was an author who was born in Sunderland and later lived and practised veterinary medicine in Thirsk, a market-town in North Yorkshire, for almost 50 years. He is best known for writing a series of somewhat autobiographical novels set in Yorkshire recounting his life stories as a vet working amongst Dales farmers. This series was later published under one title, All Creatures Great and Small. Whilst overall his work is based on his life, most of Herriot’s stories are only loosely based on real events or people, but are grounded in his experiences living and working in the Yorkshire Dales. His work has now been adapted into a TV show, All Creatures Great and Small, and his veterinary surgery and home can be visited in Thirsk, now a museum.

Possibly three of the most influential authors of the literary canon, Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë were sisters, born in Thornton and later associated with Howarth, a village in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where they lived in the parsonage with their brother Branwell. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was the first of the novels to find success, followed by Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, all three now acknowledged as classics. Whilst all three novels are set in rural England, of the sisters it is Emily’s Wuthering Heights that has a significant setting. The gothic novel centres the themes of obsession, violence and death as it focuses on the love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff against the backdrop of the bleak and windy North York moors. There are two main settings, the first the aristocratic manor Thrushcross Grange, which is juxtaposed by the second, the barren farmhouse of Wuthering Heights. Brontë based the farmhouse, a dilapidated and isolated structure, on Top Withens, a ruin on the moors near Haworth (pictured). The novel, inspired by our local environment, became a gargantuan success within literature, influencing the genres of gothic literature and black romanticism forever, and becoming almost mythical in its status as a classical text.