Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, in the Calder Valley near Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1930. When he was 8 the family moved to Mexborough in South Yorkshire to run a newsagent's, and he settled in north Devon, but the landscape and memories of the Calder Valley had a huge claim on his imagination. His first wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath, is buried in Heptonstall churchyard, and he maintained a connection with the area through the Arvon Writer's Foundation, one of whose centres is in a house once owned by Hughes at Lumb Bank near Heptonstall. (Lumb Bank is the house seen in the title frame to the poem 'The Warm and the Cold'.)

Hughes was educated at Mexborough Grammar School, and studied English Literature, Anthropology and Archaeology at Pembroke College, Cambridge in the 1950s. He is one of the world's most respected poets, and had a long and distinguished career as a poet, writer and translator. For a long period he also worked as a farmer - an experience documented in Moortown Diary. He was made Poet Laureate. Two of his last books, Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters, received enormous popular and critical acclaim.

Ted Huges died on 28 October 1998. He was buried on 3 November at North Tawton church in Devon. Speaking at his funeral, the poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney said:

'No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and and the walls of learning are broken.'

Bibliography

A complete bibliography of Ted Hughes is beyond the scope of these notes. He wrote in many forms for both adults and children. Among his poetry collections are Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo, Crow, Selected Poems 1957-1981, Remains of Elmet, New Selected Poems 1957-1994 and Birthday Letters.

His poems and stories for children include How The Whale Became, The Iron Man, Season Songs, What Is the Truth?, Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth and The Iron Woman.

He published several anthologies of poetry, including The Rattle Bag and (with Seamus Heaney) The School Bag, and translated verse and drama from other languages, for example Seneca's Oedipus, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lorca's Blood Wedding.

The programme draws particularly on Hughes's Poetry in the Making and on the short story 'The Deadfall' from his prose collection Difficulties of a Bridegroom.

All the above are published by Faber and Faber.