Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 in Mytholmroyd, a small mill town in West Yorkshire. His father made portable wooden buildings. The family moved to Mexborough, a coal-mining town in South Yorkshire, when Hughes was seven. His parents took over a newsagent and tobacconist shop, and eventually he went to the local grammar school.

In 1948 Hughes won an Open Exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge. Before going there, he served two years National Service in the Royal Air Force. Between leaving Cambridge and becoming a teacher, he worked at various jobs, finally as a script-reader for Rank at their Pinewood Studios.

In 1956 Hughes married the American poet Sylvia Plath, who died in 1963, and they had two children. He remarried in 1970. He was awarded the OBE in 1977, created Poet Laureate in December 1984 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1998. He died in October 1998.

 

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Featured Books, with extracts by Ted Hughes

Collected Poems For Children
Ted Hughes
An essential poetry collection for children of all ages that brings together the poems that Ted Hughes wrote for children throughout his life. The text is complemented by some completely stunning illustrations by Raymond Briggs. Divided according to age it’s...
Format: Paperback - Released: 06/03/2008

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Collected Poems For Children
Ted Hughes
Age 11+ Written by Ted Hughes and illustrated by Raymond Briggs (The Snowman) this beautiful collection has been specially arranged to start with poems for younger readers and progress to the more complex and sophisticated for older children. Ted Hughes, a...
Format: Hardback - Released: 26/10/2005

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The Iron Man
Ted Hughes
One of the greatest modern fairy stories, this tells of the strange giant Iron Man who appears from nowhere and begins a reign of terror throughout the countryside as he smashes up the farmers’ tractors and diggers. How the farmers...
Format: Paperback - Released: 29/04/2005

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How the Whale became and other stories
Ted Hughes
First published 25 years ago, this book by the Poet Laureate is now regarded as a classic of its kind. It includes 11 stories of what happened to a number of animals, including the owl, whale, polar bear, and the...
Format: Paperback (b Format) - Released: 20/05/1990

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Books by Ted Hughes

Timmy the Tug
Jim Downer, Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. This book contains a children's poem that features Timmy who escapes from his moorings. It also features the subsequent adventures on the high seas.
Format: Hardback - Released: 21/09/2009

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Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
Right from the beginning, Ted Hughes (1930-98) wrote in a way that set him apart from his contemporaries, as Simon Armitage puts it in his introduction. By the time he published his final collection, Birthday Letters in 1998, he had...
Format: Hardback - Released: 07/05/2009

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Letters of Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art which combines writing and talking. This selection documents the course...
Format: Hardback - Released: 01/11/2007

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Selected Translations
Ted Hughes
Offers a selection from the author's numerous translations, and excerpts from essays and letters. This volume selects from his versions from a variety of ancient texts - The Tibetan Book of the Dead , Aeschylus , Euripides , Ovid ,...
Format: Hardback - Released: 02/11/2006

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Collected Poems for Children
Ted Hughes
A collection that brings together the poems Ted Hughes wrote throughout his life for children. They are arranged by volume, beginning with those younger readers and progressing to the more complex and sophisticated poems. The author brings to the collection...
Format: Hardback - Released: 06/10/2005

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The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
From Hawk in the Rain (1957), to his death in 1998, Ted Hughes has been a giant on the 20th-century literary landscape. This collection gathers five decades of his work, including such ground-breaking volumes as Crow , Tales from Ovid...
Format: Hardback - Released: 16/10/2003

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The Cat and the Cuckoo
Ted Hughes
This collection of Ted Hughes's animal poems for younger readers is accompanied by illustrations from Flora McDonnell.
Format: Hardback - Released: 04/11/2002

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Birthday Letters
Ted Hughes
With just two exceptions, these 88 poems, in the form of an intimate and candid narrative, are addressed to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom Hughes was married. They were written over a period of more than 25 years,...
Format: Hardback - Released: 29/01/1998

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Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being
Ted Hughes
Attempts to show Shakespeare's complete works - dramatic and poetic - as a single, tightly-integrated, evolving organism. Identifying Shakespeare's use in two poems of two religious myths, Hughes argues that they provided Shakespeare with templates for every play from All's...
Format: Hardback - Released: 13/04/1992

Price: £50.00

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Letters of Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter-writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art which combines writing and talking. This title documents the course of...
Format: Paperback - Released: 05/11/2009

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How the Whale Became
Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes' classic text is accompanied by the illustrations of Jackie Morris to bring creation myths to young readers.
Format: Paperback - Released: 04/09/2008

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Collected Poems for Children
Ted Hughes
Bringing together the poems Ted Hughes wrote for children, this collection is arranged by volume, beginning with those for reading aloud to the very young, progressing to the poems in Under the North Star and What is the Truth? and...
Format: Paperback - Released: 06/03/2008

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Poetry in the Making A Handbook for Writing and Teaching
Ted Hughes
Explores various themes such as 'Capturing Animals', 'Wind and Weather' and 'Writing about People'. This book encourages children to think and write for themselves via a discussion of the poems.
Format: Paperback - Released: 07/02/2008

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Ted Hughes: Selected Translations
Ted Hughes
The achievement of Ted Hughes as a poet is inseparable from his achievement as a translator of poetry and poetic drama. This volume selects from his versions of a wide variety of ancient texts - Aeschylus , Euripides , Ovid...
Format: Paperback - Released: 01/11/2007

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A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse
Ted Hughes
A selection of Shakespeare's poems and dramatic speeches, along with the author's accompanying essay. It intends to show how Shakespeare's language unites in its sinews and substance the full range of Elizabethan preoccupations, philosophical and social.
Format: Paperback - Released: 01/02/2007

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Moortown Diary
Ted Hughes
Part of the Devon farming sequence, with an introduction sketching in the background.
Format: Paperback - Released: 06/04/2006

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Keith Douglas
Ted Hughes
Presents a biography of Keith Douglas (1920-1944), who began writing when he was at school at Christ's Hospital School, London, continued at Oxford, and thereafter in the army and in the Middle East. He was killed in Normandy, aged only...
Format: Paperback - Released: 02/03/2006

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Collected Poems of Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
The Collected Poems spans fifty years of work, from Hawk in the Rain to the bestselling Birthday Letters. It also includes the complete texts of such seminal publications as Crow and Tales from Ovid as well as those children's poems...
Format: Paperback - Released: 21/07/2005

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The Iron Woman
Ted Hughes
The Iron Woman has come to take revenge on mankind. Full of the power and fantastic imagination of his book The Iron Man , this sequel from the late Poet Laureate is a cry against the relentless pollution of the...
Format: Paperback - Released: 23/06/2005

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The School Bag
Ted Hughes
The new anthology is designed to present a great range of poetry in a fresh and accessible way. Allowing no more than one poem, or passage of poetry, to any poet, the editors have chosen not only work from the...
Format: Paperback - Released: 17/03/2005

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The Rattle Bag
Ted Hughes
Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes have brought together an inspired and diverse selection, ranging from undisputed masterpieces to rare discoveries, as well as drawing upon works in translation and traditional poems from oral cultures. In effect, this anthology has transformed...
Format: Paperback - Released: 17/03/2005

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The Iron Man
Ted Hughes
Mankind must put a stop to the dreadful destruction caused by the Iron Man. A trap is set for him, but he cannot be kept down. Then, when a terrible monster from outer space threatens to lay waste to the...
Format: Paperback - Released: 03/03/2005

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The Dreamfighter And Other Creation Tales
Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes's critically acclaimed creation stories for children appear here in one collected volume for the first time. These are mesmerising tales from a master storyteller about the creatures around us - how they came to be the shape that...
Format: Paperback - Released: 07/10/2004

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Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
In the Poet to Poet series, a contemporary poet advocates a poet of the past or present whom they have particularly admired. By their selection of verses and their critical reactions, the selectors offer intriguing insights into their own work....
Format: Paperback - Released: 04/03/2004

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Emily Dickinson
Ted Hughes
In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. The editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature...
Format: Paperback - Released: 04/03/2004

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The Hawk in the Rain
Ted Hughes

Format: Paperback - Released: 05/06/2003

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Collected Plays for Children
Ted Hughes
This volume contains six plays suitable for performance by children. Four were published under the title The Coming of the Kings and Other Plays , and the other two are Orpheus , previously only published in America, and The Pig...
Format: Paperback - Released: 05/11/2001

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Crow From the Life and Songs of the Crow
Ted Hughes
Crow was Ted Hughes's fourth book of poems for adults and a pivotal moment in his writing career. In it, he found both a structure and a persona that gave his vision a new power and coherence. A. Alvarez wrote...
Format: Paperback - Released: 03/09/2001

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New Selected Poems
Ted Hughes
A selection of work by the former Poet Laureate ranging from The Hawk in the Rain to Rain-Charm for the Duchy , as well as uncollected poems from each decade of his working life. Hughes also included a group of...
Format: Paperback - Released: 06/08/2001

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The Iron Man A Story in Five Nights
Ted Hughes
Hughes's classic about a huge iron man who struggles to put himself together after being smashed to pieces falling from a cliff, and then takes on a giant dragon in an unfair contest. It was first published in 1968 and...
Format: Paperback - Released: 09/04/2001

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The Complete Poems
Keith Douglas, Ted Hughes
Before he was killed in Normandy in 1944, Keith Douglas had achieved a considerable body of work. With an introduction from Ted Hughes, this book comprehensively brings together the poems of one of the most promising poets of World War...
Format: Paperback - Released: 03/04/2000

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The Mermaid's Purse
Ted Hughes
A collection of children's poems by the late Poet Laureate. All of them are about the sea and some of the characters who live in and around it: a bashful mussel, a boastful limpet, a thieving sandflea, an orphaned seal.
Format: Paperback - Released: 01/11/1999

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Tales from Ovid Play Twenty-four Passages from the Metamorphoses
Tim Supple, Simon Reade, id , Ted Hughes
An adaptation of Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid for the stage. Tim Supple is Artistic Director of the Young Vic. He has already adapted Grimm and Rushdie, and worked with Hughes on Spring Awakening and Blood Wedding .
Format: Paperback - Released: 19/04/1999

Price: £7.49 - Saving 2.50 (25%)

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Birthday Letters
Ted Hughes
With just two exceptions, these 88 poems, in the form of an intimate and candid narrative, are addressed to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom Ted Hughes was married. They were written over a period of more than 25...
Format: Paperback - Released: 17/03/1999

Price: £7.49 - Saving 2.50 (25%)

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Vasko Popa Collected Poems
Vasko Popa, Ted Hughes
From surrealist fable to traditional folk-tale, from personal anecdote to tribal myth, Vasko Popa's poetry embodies in an original form the most profound imaginative truths of our age, precisely located in the reality and history of Serbia, in the heart...
Format: Paperback - Released: 14/01/1999

Price: £12.71 - Saving 4.24 (25%)

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By Heart 101 Poems and How to Remember Them
Ted Hughes
In his introduction to this anthology, the late Ted Hughes explains how we can overcome the problem by using a memory system that becomes easier the more frequently it is practised. The collected 101 poems are both personal favourites and...
Format: Paperback - Released: 06/10/1997

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Tales from Ovid Twenty-four Passages from the Metamorphoses
Ted Hughes, id
Hughes's three contributions to the anthology After Ovid an accurate account of the original so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person. This volume continues the project,...
Format: Paperback - Released: 05/05/1997

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Difficulties of a Bridegroom
Ted Hughes
A collection of short fiction by the Poet Laureate, taken from 40 years of occasional story-writing. The nine pieces, some of which appeared among the poems in Wodwo , incorporate themes of violence, estrangement and arduous testing.
Format: Paperback - Released: 04/11/1996

Price: £10.00

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Collected Animal Poems What is the Truth?
Ted Hughes
The second of four volumes of animal poems for children and adults which Ted Hughes has himself arranged in a sequence of increasing complexity. Each volume is available separately, for different age-groups, and they are also available as a boxed...
Format: Paperback - Released: 18/09/1995

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Collected Animal Poems A March Calf
Ted Hughes
The third of four volumes of animal poems for children and adults which Ted Hughes has himself arranged in a sequence of increasing complexity. Each volume is available separately, for different age-groups, and they are also available as a boxed...
Format: Paperback - Released: 18/09/1995

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Collected Animal Poems The Thought Fox
Ted Hughes
The fourth of four volumes of animal poems for children and adults which Ted Hughes has himself arranged in a sequence of increasing complexity. Each volume is available separately, for different age-groups, and they are also available as a boxed...
Format: Paperback - Released: 18/09/1995

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Winter Pollen Occasional Prose
Ted Hughes
A collection of prose pieces by the Poet Laureate, on literary matters and on writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Walter de la Mare, T.S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath. Hughes also expresses concerns about education,...
Format: Paperback - Released: 06/03/1995

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Elmet
Ted Hughes, Fay Godwin, Fay Godwin
Fay Godwin is commonly regarded as this country's finest landscape photographer. Ted Hughes, who was born and brought up in the part of the world she has captured in these atmospheric studies, was inspired by them to provide a verse...
Format: Paperback - Released: 24/10/1994

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Three Books Remains of Elmet , Cave Birds and River
Ted Hughes
When Remains of Elmet , Cave Birds and River were first published, the weight of each collection tended to be overlooked in favour of other considerations. This book shows the coherence and poetic strength of each sequence and its relationship...
Format: Paperback - Released: 28/06/1993

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Nessie the Mannerless Monster
Ted Hughes
This poem tells the story of how the Loch Ness monster, weary of having her existence denied, sets off towards London.
Format: Paperback - Released: 27/04/1992

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Tales of the Early World
Ted Hughes
In this collection of tales from the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, God appears as an artist who is sometimes surprised by his creatures. He puts an awful lot of care into fashioning the birds, whereas he simply pulls Newt out...
Format: Paperback - Released: 15/10/1990

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Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth
Ted Hughes
Ffangs lived with the other vampires on Vampire Island, but he was different from the rest as he couldn't stand the sight of blood. When he arrives in London everyone is too frightened to listen while he tries to explain...
Format: Paperback - Released: 30/04/1990

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How the Whale Became and Other Stories
Ted Hughes
First published 25 years ago, this book by the Poet Laureate is now regarded as a classic of its kind. It includes 11 stories of what happened to a number of animals, including the owl, whale, polar bear, and the...
Format: Paperback - Released: 20/11/1989

Price: £4.49 - Saving 1.50 (25%)

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Meet My Folks!
Ted Hughes
A collection of humorous verse for children, based on the extraordinary adventure of Granny the Octopus and Aunt Flo the Witch.
Format: Paperback - Released: 27/04/1987

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Season Songs
Ted Hughes

Format: Paperback - Released: 14/10/1985

Price: £5.24 - Saving 1.75 (25%)

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Selected Poems
Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes
A reprinted selection of the earliest work of Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn which should be valuable as a historical document. It shows certain shared features and also serves to demonstrate, with the benefit of hindsight, how distinct these two...
Format: Paperback - Released: 14/03/1983

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Ted Hughes Poetry in the Making
Ted Hughes
Draws on the broadcasts Ted Hughes made for schools, particularly the highly praised Listening and Writing series, later published as Poetry in the Making , in which Hughes aimed to encourage an interest in imaginative writing in 10-14 year olds.
Format: CD-Audio - Released: 01/10/2008

Price: £12.75 - Saving 3.19 (20%)

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Seven Ages an Anthology of Poetry with Music
William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes
Presents an anthology of verse that is the comic, tender and telling story of life's seven ages - from childhood to old age. Within the framework of Shakespeare's speech, The Seven Ages of Man , performed by Sir Ian McKellan,...
Format: CD-Audio - Released: 30/01/2000

Price: £8.24 - Saving 2.75 (25%)

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