Michael Symmons Roberts FRSL (born 1963 in Preston, Lancashire) is a British poet. He has published eight collections of poetry, all with Cape (Random House), and has won the Forward Prize, the Costa Book Award and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, as well as major prizes from the Arts Council and Society of Authors. He has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. He has also written novels, libretti and texts for oratorios and song cycles. He regularly writes and presents documentaries and dramas for broadcasting and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Life and career Michael Symmons Roberts spent his childhood in Lancashire before moving south with his family to Newbury in Berkshire in the early '70s. He went to comprehensive school in Newbury, then to Regent's Park College, Oxford to read Philosophy and Theology. After graduating, he trained as a newspaper journalist before joining the BBC in Cardiff as a radio producer in 1989. He moved with the BBC to London, then to Manchester, initially in radio, then as a documentary filmmaker. His last job at the corporation was as Executive Producer and Head of Development for BBC Religion and Ethics, before he left the BBC to focus on writing. Symmons Roberts' family was passively secular, but in his early teens he became a thoroughgoing atheist. When he gained a place at Oxford, this led him to change his course to Theology and philosophy, and his college to a Christian one, simply so that he could talk believers out of their faith. But things did not go according to plan: "As university went on I got deeply into philosophy — and the philosophy completely undermined my atheism, by making me realize that there was no overarching objectivity, no Dawkinsian bedrock of common sense if you strip everything away. I realized that atheism was just as culturally conditioned as being a Catholic." The Oxford way of teaching, with its deconstructing, analytical approach, proved fatal, he says, to his assumption as "a naively dogmatic young atheist ... that atheism is exactly the same as 'common sense' or objectivity. I'm not saying that in psychological terms we can't be objective. I just mean that there is no framework of thought that can be completely objective. I have exactly the same problem with unquestioning religious dogmatism." A convert to Roman Catholicism,