Author(s): Ted Hughes (selected & ed Christopher Reid)

Culture & Ideas

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 begins when Hughes was seventeen, and documents the course of a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to other lives (including a readership comprising both adults and children): a life pared down to essentials and yet eventful, peripatetic, at times publicly controversial. First published 2007.