David Harsent (born in Devon in 1942) is an English poet who for some time earned his living as a TV scriptwriter and crime novelist.
[1] During his early career he was part of a circle of poets centred on Ian Hamilton and forming something of a school, promoting conciseness and imagist-like clarity in verse, though his work has changed and developed a good deal since then.
Night (2012) was triple short-listed for major awards in the UK and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize.
Sprinting from the Graveyard, his versions of poems written by the Bosnian poet Goran Simić, while under siege in Sarajevo, appeared in 1997 and was adapted to opera, radio and television.
His work in music theatre has involved collaborations with a number of composers (but most often with Sir Harrison Birtwistle) and has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the Southbank Centre, The Proms, the Wiener Kammeroper, the Southbank Centre, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Holland Festival, and broadcast on BBC Two, Channel 4 and Trio (USA).