YOUR NEW NOVEL IS SET IN A GLOOMY NORTHERN TOWN. IS IT IN WEST YORKSHIRE?
No, it's what we could call the North West, I think. It's got more to do with cotton textiles.

IS A SENSE OF PLACE REALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU?

I suppose it must be. I still live only four or five miles from where I grew up. I like it in West Yorkshire. I suppose I don't really know that I'm writing about these places because it seems like the world to me but I guess other people make a distinction. If you write about the North you are a northern writer but if you write about the South you are a writer.

YOU HAVE NOT MOVED AWAY?

Everything I need is here. There might have been a time a s a writer when there might have been a requirement to be nearer London or spend more time there but these days if you've got all the various gadgets you don't need to be there.

WHAT ARE THE REWARDS AND PROBLEMS OF WRITING POETRY FOR TELEVISION?

I think the rewards are that you meet other people. You hear different ideas. You can become a bit narrow I think, just sitting there writing poems and thinking poetically all the time. It does you good to get out and to cross-fertilise with people. You can't write poems all the time. Who would want to read them? I just don't feel in a poetic mood everyday and I'm curious about art, and the way it works, and about writing and I'm interested in seeing how far I can extend what I can do to other art forms.

A novel way to choose a film...

DO YOU THINK A WRITER'S JOB IS TO SHOCK?

Not necessarily to shock but to challenge. Pornography was a film about women working in the industry - that word just seems to set people on fire. We got some amazing reviews and some incredible hostility whereas all we did was really to allow people to tell their stories and to show us what they do.

WOULD YOU ADVISE ANYONE WHO WANTS TO BE A POET TO PERSEVERE?

No, I don't want any competition. They should go away and work in a shoeshop. What I would say is it is a very rewarding thing to do but it's a very available thing. It's not like putting an opera on or throwing a pot. It's very simple by comparison. You just need to be able to read and write and most of us can do that. I suppose I think that if you can achieve some kind of success or progress with your writing it allows you the kind of freedom to say what you want and to be heard and that's quite a rare commodity and you don't have to make a big song and dance about it either. It's just one voice, somebody saying something that they really mean.

IN THE PAST YOU SEEM TO HAVE GOT IDEAS FROM ACTIVITIES LIKE GOING CLUBBING.

Inspiration can come from anywhere. I guess if I look back through my earlier books they describe a fairly free and easy lifestyle and I can see that domestication has come through time and I don't necessarily write about the same subjects. I think its less about inspiration, it's more about exhilaration and that can come from overhearing a little bit of language, it ca be a passionate political idea or it could be an idea escalating and becoming inflamed in your imagine but it's a kind of rush, a buzz that you want to follow up with words and language and trap on a page.

I don't think you have to go to exotic locations to be able to write. I often say to students if you can write about everyday things you are on the way to having an audience of hundreds and thousands of people who have shared these experiences. I think for me it's a way of trying to see everyday events not in a new way but in a way that only I can experience them because I am not like everybody else and that's absolutely true for everybody. It's about trying to find the right words to express that.

(Simon Armitage's first novel Little Green Man is about to come to the big screen.)

DO YOU THINK GREAT BOOKS MAKE GREAT FILMS?

They can do. I think there is a complex relationship between the two... People become completely loyal to books. They have a personal relationship with a novel and go along and see the film and say it wasn't really as good as the book. It hasn't got the same relationship but I think films work best when they don't try and recreate the book, when they try and do something artistic like Trainspotting which I thinks was one of the best British films ever made. I think the book's great as well but they are two completely different vehicles really.

Simon Armitage was in Bradford as a guest of Film Extra, a new film and book club where audiences are given the chance to choose a film adaptation to be screened at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. So far 700 nominations have been received with the most popular film being To Kill A Mockingbird. This film now goes up against David Copperfield chosen by this year's Special Guest at the Bradford Film Festival Ian Carmichael and Wuthering Heights suggested by Festival Director Tony Earnshaw.

If you are in the museum look out for the ingenious way you can cast your vote!

Simon Armitage's The White Stuff is published by Penguin Viking.