Mark Simpson has become a major figure in British musical life, active equally as a clarinetist and composer. He won the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year awards in 2006, becoming the first person to take both awards.

Simpson was born on September 26, 1988, in Liverpool. He benefited from free music lessons financed by the city government. Offered the choice between the clarinet and flute, he chose the former because he succeeded in making a sound with it. He made rapid progress at Liverpool's King David High School, also traveling to Manchester on weekends for lessons at the Royal Northern College of Music. Simpson played in the Merseyside Youth Orchestra (now the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Orchestra), and later in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. As a composer, he was inspired by Liverpool's contemporary music-oriented Ensemble 10/10. Simpson found many opportunities coming his way after his dual 2006 wins but continued his studies, attending the Royal College of Music and then switching to St. Catherine's College, Oxford. He also studied composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Julian Anderson. Simpson earned major fellowship support from the Young Classical Artists Trust and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship. He was a BBC New Generation Artist from 2012 to 2014, and from 2015 to 2019, he was the composer-in-association with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.

Simpson has achieved renown both as a performer and as a composer, and he has said that he finds it difficult to balance the two roles. As a clarinetist, he has performed with most of the major BBC orchestras as well as with the City of London Symphony Orchestra. Simpson has played recitals at such major venues as Wigmore Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, and the Cheltenham Festival. His large-scale compositions include sparks (2012), which was commissioned for the Last Night of the Proms in London, the orchestral work Israfel (2014), performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the oratorio The Immortal (2015), and an opera, Pleasure (2016), with a libretto by Melanie Challenger about a woman who works as a toilet attendant in a gay nightclub.

Simpson's compositions as early as Un regalo (2004) have appeared on recordings, and he has been recorded by the NMC label both as a clarinetist (on the album Prism, 2011) and as a composer. In 2020, he was featured on an Orchid Classics release, playing his own composition, Geysir, based on Mozart's Gran Partita, K. 361. ~ James Manheim, Rovi