The Ted Hughes Society Podcast

 Our guest for this episode is Mark Wormald, current chair of the Ted Hughes Society, and a leading scholar, editor and irrepressible enthusiast for the work of Ted Hughes.  In this latest podcast in the short series ‘Meet Our Folks’, Mark traces his growing scholarly and personal interest in Ted Hughes’s poetry and life and Hughes passionate concern for the preservation and cleanliness...

Welcome to the Ted Hughes Society podcast.   As you may know, one of Ted Hughes’s first books, published in 1961, was Meet My Folks , a collection of humorous poems for children about an imagined family. Having reached episode 26 of this podcast, it seems time to introduce some of our folks - the officers of the Ted Hughes Society, who are responsible for such things as building and upda...

This episode of the Ted Hughes Society podcast is a reading of his own poems by Grahame Davies -  poet, author, editor, librettist, psycho-geographer, literary critic and member of the Ted Hughes Society.  Graham was brought up in the former coal mining village of Coedpoeth near Wrexham in north east Wales, and received a BA (Hons) in English from Anglia Ruskin U...

Welcome to a pre-Christmas feast of seasonal and Christmas poetry and story and read by members of the Ted Hughes Society who are also highly accomplished published writers. Many thanks you to James Longwill, Terry Gifford, Matt Howard, Alison Light, Katherine Robinson, David Day and Grahame Davies for such an extraordinarily varied, thought-provoking and in so many ways profoundly engaging collec...

This is the second podcast of this fourth season, and also the second to feature the poetry of Steve Ely.   In this episode of the podcast, Steve reads from three long poems which look at the struggles of particular species to survive in the Anthropocene -  the present geological era which is defined by the significant and lasting impact of human activities on Earth’s ecosystems and the...

Welcome to the first episode of the fourth season of the Ted Hughes Society podcast and the first of two recordings of poems by the poet and leading Ted Hughes scholar Steve Ely. The two readings together will cover the seven books of poetry and three pamphlets which Steve has published since 2013. In this first reading, Steve will be reading poems from Oswald’s Books of Hours (Smok...

For this episode of the Ted Hughes Society podcast, we are delighted to welcome back Ann Skea - one of the world's leading Ted Hughes scholars, and surely the greatest living authority on the place of myth, legend, the magical and occult in Ted Hughes’s poetry and prose.  Many of Ted Hughes best-loved and most distinctive poems are concerned with the outer and inner lives of what some cr...

The second episode of the Ted Hughes Society podcast to feature the English poet and educationist Pie Corbett. In the previous podcast Pie talked about how Ted Hughes had been an inspiration to him, as a student, as a young poet, and in his early teaching career how Ted Hughes's 'Poetry in the Making' was an invaluable resource in developing his own strategies for encouraging pupils’ poetry w...

Our guest for this episode is Pie Corbett, a highly respected author, poet and a highly influential educationist. He has written or edited more than two hundred books, including poetry collections, anthologies and books which are widley used in schools to encourage pupils' personal writing and the development of communication skills.  Pie has been a classroom teacher, a head teacher and&...

This is the third episode in our short series on Ted Hughes and Education, and looks at how Ted Hughes's poetry, and especially his justly famous book on writing Poetry in The Making (Faber & Faber, 2008), can encourage secondary school pupils to not only enjoy reading and writing poetry but also grow in self-confidence.  Di Beddow - who in the first episode of season 3 recalled some of t...

This special Christmas edition of the Ted Hughes Society podcast, and the society’s gift to all lovers of fine poetry, is a reading by Matt Howard from his second collection Broadlands , published earlier this year by Bloodaxe Books.  Matt is a member of a gifted generation of younger poets who have found inspiration and encouragement in their work from reading the poetry of Ted Hughes. Matt...

This is the second Ted Hughes Society podcast in season three and also the second in our series on Ted Hughes and Education. Our guest contributor for this podcast is Max Raab. After a career in investment banking, Max Raab enrolled as an MA student on the Poetics of Imagination course at Dartington Arts School, Devon. In this podcast, Max talks about his experience of creating Who or What Is...

The first of a new series of podcasts looking at Ted Hughes In Education, starting with Dr. Di Beddow reflecting on her experiences as a PhD student at Queen Mary University London, researching and writing her thesis on 'The Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath'. Di Beddow was born in Cambridge and has spent much of her life living and working in or near Cambridge. She was educated at the...

A reading by Mark Haworth-Booth from his second collection of poems The Thermobaric Playground,  published in 2022 by Dempsey and Windle under their Vole imprint. Mark studied English Literature at Cambridge University, Art History at Edinburgh University and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. However he is probably best known for his work in photography. Mark served...

This episode of the Ted Hughes Society Podcast is a reading of a selection of his own poetry by Terry Gifford. As well as being a poet, Terry is also a distinguished critic and scholar, particularly of the works of Ted Hughes and D.H.Lawrence and the genre of pastoral literature, a writer of popular non-fiction books on rock climbing and mountaineering, and a past chair of the Ted Hughes...

A reading of his own poems by Hugh Dunkerley, poet, Professor of Literature and a member of the Ted Hughes Society. Hugh has published two collections of poetry with the Cinnamon Press, Hare in 2010 and Kin in 2019, from which he will be reading. Hugh grew up in Edinburgh and Bath and studied at the universities of Southampton and Chichester. His PhD thesis was entitled Poetry as Via Negativa...

This is the third episode of the podcast to focus on Ted Hughes's Gaudete, the book which distinguished British composer Stuart MacRae described in his programme note to his setting of eight parts of the poem as: 'Part film scenario, part novel, part poetry collection, it passes through a series of different states and modes of expression, from the hallucinatory prose-poem of the Prologue, through...

This is the second episode of the podcast to focus on Gaudete, the book which even admirers of Hughes often find his most puzzling and difficult.        Gaudete began as a scenario for a film in 1962. According to Elaine Feinstein in her biography of Ted Hughes, it was sent to a Swedish film director, almost certainly Ingmar Bergman. However, according to Ma...

This podcast is rather different from the previous podcasts. Rather than consisting of either readings of poems or prose by Ted Hughes, or a talk or discussion focusing on some aspect of the work of Ted Hughes, this podcast pays tribute to the inspiration that Ted Hughes’s poetry continues to provide to other writers.   Four members of the Ted Hughes Society - Mark Haworth-Booth, Mi...

Ann Skea, expert on Ted Hughes and spirituality, the occult and the Goddess reflects on the vacanas, the short 'hymns and psalms to a nameless female deity' which end the epilogue to Gaudete (first published 1977). Introduced by Katherine Robinson. Ann Skea was born in England and migrated to Australia with her husband and children in 1967. She lived in Hong Kong between 1976 and 1979, and current...

This episode looks at the extensive and rapidly growing Ted Hughes archive which is housed at Hughes's old college, Pembroke College, Cambridge. Contributing to this podcast are Lizzy Einnon-Smith and Mark Wormald. The podcast is introduced by Katherine Robinson. Lizzy graduated from St. Hilda's College, Oxford, and is Archivist at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She was formerly an Archivist at St....

In this episode, poet and retired schoolmaster David Day contributes to the theme of Ted Hughes and religion with a commentary on Hughes's early poem 'The Casualty' ( The Hawk In The Rain (1957) Faber & Faber: p.49; Ted Hughes: Collected Poems e d. Paul Keegan (2003) Faber & Faber: p.42). David took a BA in English and History at Durham where he regularly turned out for the university cric...

This is the second of two podcasts recorded with Dr. Mike Sweeting on the topic of Ted Hughes's relationship with religion - specifically Christianity. Mike concludes his observations with his thoughts on how some of Ted Hughes's later work - particularly some of the poems included in Birthday Letters, the last collection published in his lifetime - indicate a change of attitude on Hughes's part:...

This is the first of two podcasts arising from conversations recorded with Dr Mike Sweeting on the topic of Ted Hughes’s relationship with religion. Mike's observations included Hughes’s fascination with various pagan and occult beliefs - ranging from his engagement with the Goddess, his fascination with shamanism, and his lifelong practice of astrology - and his antipathy, stated on sev...

The third Ted Hughes Society Podcast centred around Mark Wormald's The Catch . In this episode, West Country storyteller and writer Martin Shaw retells the legend of The Salmon of Knowledge; scholar and poet Katherine Robinson tells to story of the ancestry, conception and birth of the great Welsh bard Taliesin; storyteller and author Liz Weir tells her version of The White Trout a tragic tale of...