Promoting the Scholarly Reading and Discussion of the work of Ted Hughes
As part of the Manchester Literary Festival, Manchester Central Library will be hosting a Celebration of Ted Hughes on 21st October 2018.
This event brings together a range of contemporary poets to perform some of their favourite Hughes poems.
For more information on the event and to book tickets please visit the festival website.
For those who may have missed it, BBC 2 recently screened a profound and thoughtful documentary on Sylvia Plath's novel, The Bell Jar. The film, Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar featured interviews with many of Plath's friends and contemporaries, and the first televised interview with Frieda Hughes on the subject of her mother.
The documentary is available within the United Kingdom via the BBC's iPlayer service until 10th September 2018.
Peter K. Steinberg has written an interesting post on some of the background to the film (and offers a few interesting quibbles) over on his Sylvia Plath Info Blog.
As part of the Manchester Literary Festival Fringe this October, a walking tour of Ted Hughes Country will be taking place on 27th October 2018.
Led by literary scholar and experienced guide Ed Glinert, the tour will take in Mytholmroyd, Lumb Bank and Heptonstall, visiting a range of key locations in Hughes's life and poetry.
For more information and to buy tickets for the tour, please visit the New Manchester Walks website.
It is now only a few days until registration for 'Poetry in the Making' the 8th International Ted Hughes Conference closes.
The conference will be hosted by Cardiff University and the full details of the programme can be found here.
This will be an event readers of Hughes will not want to miss, and registration closes on 31st July 2018. Don't delay!
The Sylvia Plath Info Blog maintained by Peter K. Steinberg (the renowned Plath scholar and co-editor of the recent magisterial edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath) has long been a source of invaluable information for those interested in either Plath or Ted Hughes's works.
Two recent posts are particularly worth checking out for those interested in Hughes.
Ted Hughes Scrapbook at Emory - in which Peter provides a detailed account of the publication scrapbook for Hughes started and compiled by Sylvia Plath.
Ted Hughes's Trunk at Emory - which reveals that some of the contents of the trunk of sealed materials included in Hughes's sale of his archive to Emory University were incorporated into his publicly-available archive there in 2003.
This month has seen the publication of what promises to be a milestone in Ted Hughes scholarship, Ted Hughes in Context.
This volume in Cambridge University Press's prestigious 'In Context' series has been edited by the Chair of the Ted Hughes Society, Professor Terry Gifford, and brings together both established and new voices in Hughes studies to present thirty-six essays addressing a wide range of perspectives on Hughes's works and his social, literary, historical and cultural engagements.
For more information on this important new book, and for the chance to purchase it from CUP, please click here.
The Society is delighted to draw attention to a recent publication by one of our members, Dr Lorraine Kerslake of the University of Alicante.
Her book The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes's Writing for Children: Correcting Nature's Error was published by Routledge this year and breaks new ground in exploring Hughes's writing for children from an ecocritical perspective. For more information and to purchase this book from the publisher please click here.
The Ted Hughes Society is pleased to announce the publication of the latest issue of The Ted Hughes Society Journal.
This issue was guest-edited by James Underwood of the Ted Hughes Network and continues the publication of the wealth of scholarship showcased at the Huddersfield Symposium last year, including essays on Hughes and landscape, his relation to anthropology and the reception of Hughes's work by writers as diverse as William Golding and Nick Cave.
This issue of the Ted Hughes Society Journal is open-access and can be found here.
Registration is now open for 'Poetry in the Making': The 8th International Ted Hughes Conference, to be hosted by Cardiff University at Gregynog Hall, 28th-30th August 2018.
The International Ted Hughes Conference is a wonderful opportunity to meet Hughes readers from all over the world, and hear a range of papers from the forefront of the flourishing field of Hughes studies. There is also a strong tradition of poetic presence at the conference, and this year will include a reading from former National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke.
Full details of how to register can be found on the conference website.
We look forward to seeing everyone at Gregynog Hall in August!
The bi-annual Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture will be given this year by the former editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, Robert McCrum at the Ways with Words Festival of Words and Ideas taking place at Dartington Hall on 7th July 2018.
Robert McCrum will be drawing on his own memories of working with Hughes as well as his sustained reading of the poet's work to explore Hughes's fascination with William Shakespeare, and to offer a reappraisal of Hughes's prose work.
For more information about the lecture and about the full ten-day programme of the festival, please check out the website.
Due to the disruption caused by the recent industrial action in the UK university sector, the organisers of 'Poetry in the Making' the 8th International Ted Hughes Conference, have extended the deadline for paper proposals to 30th April 2018. So for anyone who was sitting on the fence, there's now more time to get a proposal together and join what is sure to be a marvellous few days discussion of Hughes.
Check out the conference website for full details.
This is just a quick reminder for those who might be planning on submitting a proposal to deliver a paper at 'Poetry in the Making': the 8th International Ted Hughes Conference, at Cardiff University, 28th-30th August 2018.
The deadline for the CfP is 31st March 2018, now only two weeks away.
Topics which papers could explore (but need not be limited to) include:
The literary afterlives of Hughes
Birthday Letters 20 years on
Dialogues with Hughes: literary friendships
Hughes and folklore
Hughes and medievalism
Hughes’s bestiary
Hughes’s prose
Hughes and tradition
Hughes and farming
Hughes’s writing for children
Hughes and place
Hughes’s manuscripts
Hughes and fishing
Hughes and Cambridge
Hughes and the Romantics
Hughes and translation
Hughes and visual culture
Hughes and Plath
Hughes and the environment
Hughes’s laureateship
For more details please see the conference website.
'Poetry in the Making', the 8th International Ted Hughes Conference, to be hosted at Cardiff University, 28th-30th August 2018, has issued a Call for Papers.
The International Ted Hughes Conference is the major event within Hughes Studies and the Society would warmly encourage any of its members or readers of its Journal to consider submitting a proposal to join in what will be sure to be a friendly, stimulating and robust event.
For full details of the conference, including plenary speakers please see the conference website.
The CfP closes on 31st March 2018.
The Ted Hughes Society would like to extend its warm congratulations to two of the Society's patrons who received honours in the New Year's List.
Lord Melvyn Bragg of Wigton was named to the Order of Companions of Honour, for services to Broadcasting and the Arts.
Sir Michael Morpurgo was named to the Order of the Knights Bachelor, the services to literature and charity.
For full details of the awards please see the full honours list.
The Society is delighted to announce the publication of a new book on Hughes by one of our members, Yvonne Reddick of the University of Central Lancashire: Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet
Drawing on cutting-edge research in ecocriticism and environmental poetics, Yvonne's book is an important new contribution not only to Hughes studies but to environmental studies more widely.
For more information and to purchase the book from its publisher, Palgrave MacMillan, please click here.
The Ted Hughes Society is pleased to announce the publication of the latest issue of the Ted Hughes Society Journal.
As well as showcasing a beautiful new design for the journal, this issue features the first selection of essays drawn from the recent colloquium hosted by the Ted Hughes Network at the University of Huddersfield in June 2017, and includes discussions of Hughes's relationship with Sylvia Plath, his reading of D.H. Lawrence and his place within Yorkshire and Irish contexts.
The Society is also pleased to announce that this issue of the Ted Hughes Society Journal represents a significant step in the widening of readership for high-quality scholarship and research on Hughes, as this is the first issue available open-access to all interested readers.
This issue of the Journal can be accessed here.
An event of considerable interest to readers of Hughes will be taking place later this month at Doonreagan, the house in Connemara where Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill lived in 1966. The Festival of Wild Atlantic Writing will be bringing together an array of speakers to explore the rich literary heritage of this beautiful part of Ireland.
For full details of the programme and the opportunity to book a place, please visit the Doonreagan website here.
Have you published on Ted Hughes’s works in whole or in part in the last three years? If so please send full details to the Ted Hughes Society Bibliographer, Danny O’Connor, at d.oconnor2@liverpool.ac.uk
Danny is keeping Keith Sagar’s bibliography up to date for the Society (and inserting items that Keith missed). We intend to maintain a list on this website of recent publications, including web availability of early obscure publications (Terry Gifford’s 1978 essay on the Wodwo play ‘The Wound’ is now available on his website, for example, together with his 2001 interview with Fay Godwin for Thumbscrew) and research disseminated via filmed talks or podcasts.
If you find a publication, talk text, or podcast that we might have missed, do sent details to Danny just in case it might have been overlooked.
Meanwhile Mark Wormald has published an article on Hughes’s images of river entomology, ‘Poetic electrons – Ted Hughes and the wonder of flies’ in Gamefisher 2017, pp. 46-49, which can be obtained by sending a cheque for £10.00 payable to ‘Salmon and Trout Conservation UK’ at PO Box 1301, Maidstone, ME14 9PX (E: hq@salon-trout.org; W: www.salmon-trout.org).
But we would also like to hear from you. So keep Danny informed of upcoming publications.
The Society is pleased to announce the publication of the latest issue of The Ted Hughes Society Journal.
The issue features essays on a range of subjects including Hughes's interests in the occult, ecology, and fishing, as well as further reflections on Jonathan Bate's recent biography, reviews and an editorial. The issue is available free of charge to all members of the Society, and can be accessed here.
If you aren't yet a member of the Society, then just click here, sign up and get reading...
We are pleased to announce that Lord Melvyn Bragg has agreed to become a patron of the Ted Hughes Society.
A renowned writer and broadcaster, Lord Bragg writes:
Ted Hughes is an outstanding poet – one of the best we have had. I read his work from the first collection he published. We became friends and I feel very honoured to be asked to be a Patron of the Ted Hughes Society.
We are very grateful to Lord Bragg for lending his support to the work of the Ted Hughes Society, and helping promote the scholarly discussion of Hughes's work.