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 University, Cambridgeand a doctorate from the University of Wales for research into the writings of R. S. Thomas, Saunders Lewis, T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil. 

Grahame worked as a journalist, for newspapers and then for the BBC, where he became News gathering Editor for BBC Wales before joining the Royal Household as Assistant Private Secretary to The Prince of Wales, later King Charles, becoming Deputy Private Secretary. Grahame left the royal household in October 2023 to become Director of Mission and Strategy for the Church in Wales.

Grahame is the author of 20 books including poetry collections in both Welsh and English, psycho-geography, novels, and intercultural studies. As a librettist and lyricist, he has collaborated with many leading composers including Sir Karl Jenkins, Paul Mealor, Sarah Class, Debbie Wiseman, Roderick Williams and Joanna Gill, and his song Sacred Fire - to music by Sarah Class - was performed by Pretty Yende at the coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla in 2023. 

As a Welsh language poet, he is the author of three solo volumes. In 1997, his first volume, Adennill Tir (Barddas), a book arising from the 11 years he spent in Merthyr Tydfil in the south Wales Valleys, won the Harri Webb Memorial Prize.[3] In 2001, his second volume, Cadwyni Rhyddid (Barddas), was awarded the Wales Arts Council's 2002 Book of the Year award at the Hay on Wye Festival.

As an English language poet, he published a bilingual volume of poetry, Ffiniau/Borders, jointly with Elin ap Hywel, with Gomer press in 2002, and his in English, Lightning Beneath the Sea, was published by Seren Press in 2012. His second, A Darker Way, also from Seren, appeared in 2024.

Interfaith relations have been one of his major concerns, and in 2002, Seren published his study, The Chosen People, examining the relationship of the Welsh and the Jewish people as reflected in literature; a second study on Wales and Islam, The Dragon and the Crescent, also from Seren, was published in 2011.

Grahame was a board member of the Welsh Academi from 2005-2011 and Welsh language editor of Poetry Wales magazine until 2002. Grahame is a frequent contributor of articles and reviews to journals and his work has been widely translated and anthologised. He was Vice President of Goodenough College in London and an Honorary Research Fellow in Cardiff University. In 2023 Graham was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. 

if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast - it does help others who might be interested in poetry or the work of Ted Hughes to find the podcast. 

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast - it does help others who might be interested in poetry or the work of Ted Hughes to find the podcast. 

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 physical structure of the planet. Steve reads first from Lives of British Shrews (published by Broken Sleep in 2023), a long poem which as the title indicates records, in vigorous and powerfully expressive verse, the challenges which these tiny but fascinating little creatures face in simply surviving for a single day. 

Steve then reads two sections fromThe European Eel (Longbarrow Press, 2021) which portrays with great imaginative and scientific clarity the extraordinary life cycle of this exceptional fish - from its birth in the Sargasso sea as a leaf-shaped leptosopholus, then drifting as a glass eel the 4,000 miles to Europe on the Gulf Stream, where transformed into first an elver and then a mature eel, it live in fresh water streams until, after a life of up to 20 years, the adult eel then swims the 4,000 miles back to the Sargasso Sea where it was born, there to mate and then die. And so the cycle begins again.

Steve concludes the reading with a three poem sequence from Orasaigh (published by Broken Sleep in 2024 with photographs by by Michael Faint). Described by Steve as an example of ‘apocalyptic landscape’ writing about the history and threats facing a ting Hebridean island. 

Steve is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield and Director of the Ted Hughes Network and a founding member of the Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) a community-based organisation which seeks to develop the legacy of Ted Hughes in and around Hughes’s childhood home of Mexborough. Steve is Director of the Ted Hughes Network, and led the consortium that developed and launched the Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire literary trails which includes guided trail walks, engaging local, poetry readings, creative writing workshops. Further information cane be found on https://discoveringtedhughesyorkshire.co.uk/ Steve also played a leading role in establishing the Ted Hughes-focused archive at the University of Huddersfield’s Heritage Quay and led the team which acquired the Mark Hinchliffe Ted Hughes collection.

Steve is currently writing a novel -The Quoz - described as ‘a folk-horrific bildungsroman set in a West Riding pit village in the Sex Pistols summer of 1977’ and completing a collaboration with the artist Alan Parker entitled White Pony.  

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steve’s poems are frequently concerned with themes of loss, damage and degradation - the degradations of habitats and the loss species of animals and plants. Steve’s concern is also with the loss and degradation of the deep and foundational cultural roots of England and Englishness, but Steve’s focus on England Englishness does not come from any conventional conservatism - as he has made abundantly clear: ‘I’m a utopian in the tradition of William Morris’, he has written, ‘seeking to bring to light neglected aspects of Englishness – the Anglo-Danish heritage, the pre-Reformation English Catholic Church, the traditions of resistance running through the silvaticii rebels against the Norman occupation, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the radicalism of the English revolution, the nineteenth and twentieth century working class movements and the particular experience of ‘the North’.

Steve is Reader in Creative Writing and Director of the Ted Hughes Network and a founding member of the Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) a community-based organisation which seeks to develop the legacy of Ted Hughes in and around Hughes’s childhood home of Mexborough. Steve is Director of the Ted Hughes Network, and led the consortium that developed and launched the Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire literary trails which includes guided trail walks, engaging local, poetry readings, creative writing workshops. Further information cane be found on https://discoveringtedhughesyorkshire.co.uk/ Steve also played a leading role in establishing the Ted Hughes-focused archive at the University of Huddersfield’s Heritage Quay and led the team which acquired the Mark Hinchliffe Ted Hughes collection.

Steve is currently writing a novel -The Quoz - described as ‘a folk-horrific bildungsroman set in a West Riding pit village in the Sex Pistols summer of 1977’ and completing a collaboration with the artist Alan Parker entitled White Pony.  

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Many of Ted Hughes best-loved and most distinctive poems are concerned with the outer and inner lives of what some critics have called his 'totemic' animals. In her preliminary comments, Ann mentions the crow, but one might also add the fox, the salmon and the pike. In her latest fascinating contribution to this series of the podcast, Ann talks about Hughes’s poems about another bird, the swallow. These poems include 'A Swallow' and ‘Swallows’ (Collected Poems Faber & Faber 2003 ps 604; 634), the four swallow poems numbered from what Hughes himself called a ‘farmyard fable’ for young readers, What Is The Truth (Faber & Faber 1995 ps 43-48), and  ‘A swallow’ and ‘Work and Play’ from Season Songs (Faber & Faber 1985 ps 23-24; 48-49).  Ann also reflects on Hughes’s translation of the story of Tereus and Philomela in Tales from Ovid; and other examples of mythological characters, with whom Hughes was familiar, who are transformed into swallows, including Isis in her attempts to bring Osiris back to life; and she recalls the closing passage of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the envious cry of ‘O swallow, swallow’ - the speaker yearning for flight and escape, to become a swallow. 

Ann Skea is the author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (University of New England, 1994), and is an internationally recognized and widely published scholar specializing in the work of Ted Hughes. Her Ted Hughes web pages (https://ann.skea.com/THHome.htm) are archived by the British Library. She is a regular book reviewer for various magazines and is a freelance writer and photographer specializing in travel, myth and culture. She has also published widely in magazines and journals. In 2016, Ann Skea was elected as an associate scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

This is the final episode of this third season of podcasts, but the Ted Hughes Society podcast will return in the autumn with a new season of readings from their works by poets who are society members, talks by leading Ted Hughes scholars and interviews with some of the many admirers of Ted Hughes poetry and prose who are actively promoting his work and ideas in schools, colleges and universities in the UK and abroad. In the meantime, if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast - it does help others who might be interested in poetry or the work of Ted Hughes to find the podcast. 

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pie has been a regular contributor the Times Educational Supplement  and among his many publications are his outstanding collection of poems for children Evidence for Dragons  (Macmillan 2011); Rice Pie and Moses (Macmillan 1995) a collection of poetry for children with fellow poets John Rice and Brian Moses; Talk for Writing Across The Curriculum (Open University Press 2020) with Julia Strong; and as an editor, A First Poetry Book  (2012 Macmillan) with Gaby Morgan) and The Works series of anthologies (Macmillan various).

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pie has been a classroom teacher, a head teacher and an Ofsted Inspector. He regularly lectures on education, has advised UK governments on education, and was responsible for the prominence of poetry objectives in the UK’s National Literacy Strategy. Pie was also heavily involved in the creation of the i-read software to help children learn how to read via visual and auditory props and he created the Talk for Writing teaching framework to enable children to write creatively, powerfully and independently.

In this first of two episodes, Pie talks about his own primary schooling and contrasts it with the much more creative and child-centred approaches which formed the basis his own teaching. He also talks about the importance of Ted Hughes’s Poetry In The Making and poems - particularly ‘The Thought-Fox’ - in developing his own approaches to encouraging pupils’ writing, and his partnership, as a writer and performer, with fellow poet and teacher Brian Moses. Pie ends the episode with two poems from his outstanding collection of poems for children, Evidence of Dragons.

Pie has been a regular contributor the Times Educational Supplement  and among his many publications are Evidence for Dragons  (Macmillan 2011), Rice Pie and Moses (Macmillan 1995) a collection of poetry for children with fellow poets John Rice and Brian Moses, Talk for Writing Across The Curriculum (Open University Press 2020) with Julia Strong; and as an editor A First Poetry Book  (2012 Macmillan) with Gaby Morgan) and The Works series of anthologies (Macmillan various).

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Di Beddow - who in the first episode of season 3 recalled some of the highs (and some of the lows) of her experiences as a doctoral student during and immediately after the covid lockdown - makes a very welcome return to the podcast. In this episode she reflects on how Ted Hughes poetry and his ideas on helping children to express themselves through their personal writing influenced a distinguished career teaching English; and she shares some of the fascinating discoveries she made in the course of her doctoral work concerning Hughes’s own short, but evidently inspiring, career as a teacher at Coleridge Secondary Modern School in Cambridge. 

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at membership@thetedhughessociety.org

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 was born in Norfolk in 1978 and is a poet and environmentalist who has worked in various roles for the RSPB for more than a decade. He is currently manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre.

Matt’s first collection, Gall,  was published by in 2018 and won the inaugural Laurel Prize for Best First Collection in 2020 and the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize.

Matt has been poet in residence for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and also the Wordsworth Trust. Since 2018 he has been a trustee of The Rialto, and was Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds 2021-2023.

The Ted Hughes `society would like to thank Bloodaxe Books for their co-operation in making this podcast and for their permission to record and share this selection of poems from Broadlands. 

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at membership@thetedhughessociety.org

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Towards the end of this podcast, Max hoped to read two of his favourite poems from Crow: ‘Crow Blacker Than Ever’ and ‘How Water Began To Play’. For copyright reasons this wasn’t possible, but Max did record his thoughts on both poems. If you have a copy of either Crow or the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes  at hand you might want to have the poems ready to read for yourself. You can find ‘Crow Blacker than Ever’ on page 62 of the anniversary edition of Crow,  published in 2020 by Faber and Faber, and ‘How Water Began to Play’ on page 87; and in the 2003 edition of The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes edited by Paul Keegan and published by Faber and Faber ‘Crow Blacker Than Ever’ is on page 244 and ‘How Water Began To Play’ on page 257. There is also an edited recording of a Webinar on Ted Hughes’s Crow featuring contributions from a number of the people Max interviewed on the You Tube channel of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnJ2c8iJRBc

In the podcast Max cites as a major influence on his project the Belorusian journalist and author Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2015. Alexievich has crafted non-fiction narratives of oral history from the statements of witnesses to some of the darkest episodes in the history of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. English translations of her work include: Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (1992) translated by Julia and Robin Whitby and published by W. W. Norton; Chernobyl Prayers: Voices from Chernobyl (2016) translated by Ann Gunin and Arch Tait and published by Penguin; and The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II (2018), translated by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Peaver and published by Penguin. 

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at membership@thetedhughessociety.org

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Cambridgeshire County High School for Girls (which is now Long Road Sixth Form), Middlesex and Roehampton Universities and the University of Warwick.  She taught in Surrey, Essex and Cambridgeshire and rose to be Acting Head at both Hinchingbrooke School in Huntingdon and Ernulf Academy in St. Neots. Di’s passion in her own school days, during her teaching career and after has been the work of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

You can read more about Di's fascinating research into the importance of Cambridge for both Hughes and Plath in the following papers, which are available online:

'Poetry and Place: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Cambridge - The Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: https://christstreasures.blogspot.com/2021/12/poetry-and-place-sylvia-plath-ted.html

'Not the colleges, or such precincts: https://dibeddow.co.uk/ths-jul-19/

Also featured in this podcast are extracts from Chapter 1 of Reading Otherways (The Thimble Press, 1998), Lissa Paul's brilliant short book on critical reading, arising from her practical experience as a teacher and her reading in feminist theory .

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at membership@thetedhughessociety.org

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 as senior curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, helping to build up its great collection of photography, and from 2002-2009 Mark was the first Visiting Professor of Photography at the University of the Arts in London. Mark is now an Honorary Research Fellow at the V&A and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. 

The Thermobaric Playground is in four sections: Habitat, The Headlined World, For the Birds and Presences, and many of the poems express Mark's passionate commitment to protecting and conserving wildlife - animals, birds, plants and insects - and the habitats in which they live and on which they depend.

Reviewing The Thermobaric Playground, the poet Fiona Benson wrote: 'These are poems with an edge; there are excoriating indictments of enivironmental damage, both local and global, and fury at the greed driving the sixth extinction. Wonderfully attentive to sound and song, these poems are bursting with exquisite visual detail. Haworth-Booth's world is ripe with human and animal wonder, humour and love. It is a world I wish to live in; it is a world worth saving.'

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at membership@thetedhughessociety.org

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Society. Terry is a pioneering and highly respected ecocritic, and he is currently Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University's Research Centre for Environmental Humanities and Professor Honorifico at the University of Alicante, Spain where he co-supervises PhD students in ecocriticism and conduct research with staff in English. 

Terry has, so far, published eight volumes of poetry, with a ninth awaiting publication. For this podcast, Terry will be reading from his unpublished ninth collection, and from his most recently published eighth collection, A Feast of Fools (Birmingham: Cinnamon Press, 2018), in which he asks the the question: Who are the fools in our world of climate change? And he admits, in this seriously playful collection, he is one among many. Terry's poems are notable for wryly celebrating people - both joyously at home in their landscapes and increasingly uneasy about what is happening around them.

Among Terry's many other publications are:

Pastoral, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2020).

Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry, 2nd edition (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2011).

The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Ted Hughes (London: Routledge, 2009).

Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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: A Creative Enquiry. Via negativa means the study of what not to do and was originally a theological term for explaining what God is by examining what he is not.

Hugh’s other academic writing includes Earthographies, Ecocriticism and Culture co-authored with Wendy Wheeler and published by Lawrence and Wishart in 2008; a chapter on religious poetry from 1960 to 2015 in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to British and Irish Poetry which was published in 2020; and an essay on Ted Hughes and Creative Writing in Ted Hughes in Context which was edited by former chair of the Ted Hughes Society Terry Gifford and published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Hugh has received an Eric Gregory Award and a Hawthornden Fellowship and was the Sussex Poet Laureate.

Gregory Leadbetter, reviewing Hugh’s most recent collection Kin in The London Magazine wrote that Hugh’s poems ‘present humane and often moving explorations of life both within and beyond the self. Children parents and parenthood, ecological and psychological crises and meditations on the interconnectedness of living things are its principal themes. the collection more often reveals its ecological anxieties in their chronic effects on human beings – not least, the reader can assume, on the poet himself. Despite bearing witness to that experience, Kin ultimately embodies a structure of affirmation: a coming-through, and a testament (in the words of ‘First Contact’) to ‘life’s / infinite scribblings’.

Hare (2010) was published by Cinnamon Press. ISBN: 978-1-907090-08-0

Kin (2019) was also published by Cinnamon Press. ISBN: 978-1-78864-017-6

At the time of releasing this podcast both books were avilable from Amazon.co.uk. For more information on Hugh Dunkerley you can go the University of Chichester's website https://www.chi.ac.uk/people/hugh-dunkerley/ and you can follow Hugh on X at @Hughdunkerley1.

 If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at membership@thetedhughessociety.org

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

   In this podcast Mike Wilson reflects on the dramatic pace of the piece, and how compelling and immersive the experience of reading Gaudete can be, and the meaning of the title: Gaudete = Rejoice. 

   Mike Wilson is Professor of Drama and Creative Arts at Loughborough University. Mike is an expert on Grand Guignol, a form of theatre which alternates short pieces depicting horror and the erotic which was originally performed at the Grand Guignol theatre in Paris. Mike is also an expert on storytelling and folklore, and is director of Loughborough University’s Storytelling Academy which has pioneered Applied Storytelling: using storytelling for social purposes such as exploring strategies to cope with loneliness, and using storytelling as a tool for reconciliation and co-operation between individuals and organisations with opposing or competing aims or views. 

      Mike’s many publications include Storytelling and Theatre: Professional Storytellers and Their Art, published by Palgrave in 2005; Grand Guignolesque: classic and contemporary horror theatre, co-edited with Richard J Hand and published in 2022 by the University of Exeter Press; and The Midnight Washerwoman and other Lower Breton Tales, , a collection of Mike’s translations, published this year by Princeton University Press in their Oddly Modern Fairytales series. For detailed information on Mike's publications please go to https://publications.lboro.ac.uk/publications/all/collated/eamw4.html and for further information on the work of the Storytelling Academy please go to https://storytellingacademy.education/

   (1): https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/work/35874/Gaudete--Stuart-MacRae/

 If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at membership@thetedhughessociety.org

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

     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 Mark Ford, in an article in the London Review of Books,  Bergman never received it, but from the nascent script Hughes developed the version of Gaudete we have which was eventually published in 1977. In this podcast Mike Wilson looks at the book in terms of its theatricality - examining the drama which is acted out by the characters, and comparable performance traditions including Grand Guignol, folk horror, and burlesque song, in particular The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle by Jake Thackray. 

   Mike Wilson is Professor of Drama and Creative Arts at Loughborough University. Mike is an expert on Grand Guignol, a form of theatre which alternates short pieces depicting horror and the erotic which was originally performed at the Grand Guignol theatre in Paris. Mike is also an expert on storytelling and folklore, and is director of Loughborough University’s Storytelling Academy which has pioneered Applied Storytelling - using storytelling for social purposes such as exploring strategies to cope with loneliness, and using storytelling as a tool for reconciliation and co-operation between individuals and organisations with opposing or competing aims or views. 

      Mike’s many publications include Storytelling and Theatre: Professional Storytellers and Their Art, published by Palgrave in 2005; Grand Guignolesque: classic and contemporary horror theatre,  co-edited with Richard J Hand and published in 2022 by the University of Exeter Press; and published this year by Princeton University Press in their Oddly Modern Fairytales series, The Midnight Washerwoman and other Lower Breton Tales, a collection of Mike’s translations. For detailed information on Mike's publications please go to https://publications.lboro.ac.uk/publications/all/collated/eamw4.html and for further information on the work of the Storytelling Academy please go to https://storytellingacademy.education/

  If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at membership@thetedhughessociety.org

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, Michael McCall, James Longwill and Terry Gifford - have recorded themselves reading poems which they have composed which they feel are in some way indebted to Ted Hughes example and the pleasure and encouragement to their own creativity that reading Hughes’s work has given them. My grateful thanks to all four poets for such excellent readings.

This podcast represents a little of the remarkable amount of creative talent which exists within the Ted Hughes Society and I hope we can make these kinds of podcasts a regular part of the programme.

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at membership@thetedhughessociety.org

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 currently lives in Sydney, although for family reasons, she also spends a good deal of time in London. Ann is trained as a pharmacist. She has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and English literature, a master’s degree in literature and a Ph.D. She obtained her degree as a mature-age student at the University of New England in Australia. Her doctorate and the area of her continuing scholarly research concerns the work of the late British Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. Ann is the author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (University of New England, 1994), and is an internationally recognized and widely published scholar specializing in the work of Ted Hughes. Her Ted Hughes web pages (https://ann.skea.com/THHome.htm) are archived by the British Library. She is a regular book reviewer for various magazines and is a freelance writer and photographer specializing in travel, myth and culture. She has also published widely in magazines and journals. In 2016, Ann Skea was elected as an associate scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

The podcast is once again introduced by Katherine Robinson. Katherine is a research student at Pembroke College, Cambridge, working on how Ted Hughes reimagined and retold early Celtic mythology in his poetry, and is the bibliographer for the Ted Hughes Society. Before coming to Pembroke College Katherine studied at Ameherst College, Massachusetts and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland, Kenyon Review, and The Hudson Review.

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lizzy graduated from St. Hilda's College, Oxford, and is Archivist at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She was formerly an Archivist at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge and King's College, Cambridge, and Records Manager at Girton College, Cambridge. As Archivist at Pembroke College it has been Lizzy's responsibility to organise and catalogue the rapidly expanding Ted Hughes archive to enable it to be used for future research into the life and work of Ted Hughes. Lizzy also maintains the website of the Cambridge Archivists' Group: https://cambridgearchivistsgroup.wordpress.com/about/

Mark Wormald is a Fellow of Pembroke College Cambridge, and Director of Studies for Part 2 English. Much of the recent expansion of the Ted Hughes archive at Pembroke College has been as a result of Mark's efforts, in particular the acquisition of Barrie Cooke's papers. Mark is the author of The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes (Bloomsbury) which was described by The Times as a 'beautifully written portrait of the poet explores his life and work through his passion for fishing.' Mark is Chair of the Ted Hughes Society.

Katherine Robinson is a research student at Pembroke College Cambridge, working on how Ted Hughes reimagined and retold early Celtic mythology in his poetry. Before coming to Pembroke College, Katherine studied at Ameherst College, Massachusetts and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and worked in a marine mammal sanctuary in the Shetland Islands. Katherine is the bibliographer for the Ted Hughes Society.

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David took a BA in English and History at Durham where he regularly turned out for the university cricket and hockey first XIs and was awarded full colours. He was an English teacher in Yorkshire for forty-two years, HMC representative on the National Curriculum, Key Stage 3 English consultative committee, and chair of the local 16+ English Examination panel.

David's collection of poems, Brass Rubbings was published by Carcanet in 1975, and a review in the Guardian praised David's poems as being "of rare delicacy of design". A further collection, After Midnight Mass, has been completed. David's poems have been published in the TLS, New York Times, Critical Quarterly, PN Review, Encounter, PEN New Poems and broadcast on BBC Radio 3.  

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Works mentioned in the podcast:

'Crow blacker than ever' from Crow: from the life and songs of the Crow (2020) with an introduction by Marina Warner. London: Faber & Faber.

'The Shot' from Birthday Letters (1998) London: Faber & Faber.

'October Salmon' from River (1983) with photographs by Peter Keen. London: Faber & Faber.

'The Strand at Lough Beg' from 100 Poems (2018) London: Faber & Faber.

For listeners who would like to read further about Ted Hughes and religion, Dr Ann Skea writes:

'Among the loose pages in the British Library file Add Ms 88918/9/9, there are several which record Hughes' pondering on his difficulties in keeping his "large multiple front operations fully operational"; and his need to make "more serious moves" if he is "truly intended to make a close communion with the divinity". He examines what he means by 'the will'; paraphrases Kirekegard's comments about the difference between "worshippers who merely imagine their relationship with the divinity and those who undergo it as a transforming experience"; and writes revealingly of his own relationship with religion and religions.

I would also reccomend Dr Krishnendu Gupta's article in vol. 8 issue 1 of The Ted Hughes Society Journal (http://thetedhughessociety.org/the-ted-hughes-society-journal-open-access) and David Troups's book length study Ted Hughes and Christianity (2019) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The opening and closing music is from String Quartet No 14, opus 131, oerfomed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mike is a committed Christian, and a former pastor, he is also a noted scholar of Ted Hughes, having completed a doctoral thesis at Durham University entitled ‘Patterns of Initiation in the Poetry of Ted Hughes 1970-1980’. One of the main themes of Mike’s thesis is the pervasive influence of shamanism in Hughes’s work from early animal poems such as The Jaguar  through to Gaudete. 

Mike is chair of the International Map Collectors’ Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Directors and a council member of The Ted Hughes Society. He is an expert on mergers and acquisitions in business, and has chaired charities working in deprived parts of NE England, India and Romania. 

Books mentioned during the podcast inlude:

Hughes, Ted (1977) Gaudete. London: Faber & Faber.

__________ (1979) Moortown Diary. London: Faber & Faber.

__________ (1979) Remains of Elmet (with photrographs by Fay Godwin). London: Faber & Faber.

__________ (1992) Shakespeare and The Gooddess of Complete Being. London: Faber & Faber.

Lewis, C.S. (2017, originally 1956) Till We Have Faces: a myth retold. London: Harper One.

__________in Fox, Denton ed.(1968) Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. London: Prentice Hall.

The opening and closing music is from String Quartet No 14, opus 131, oerfomed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'Floral Tribute' by Simon Armitage can be read at https://www.faber.co.uk/journal/floral-tribute-by-simon-armitage/. 'The Salmon of Knowledge' is taken from Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems (2020) by Martin Shaw and Tony Hoagland, published by Graywolf Press. Mabinogion Legends: Kilwch and Owen, Peredur, Lludd and Llevelys, Taliesin (1992) Translated by Charlotte Guest is published by Llanerch Publishers. 'The White Trout' is from the CD Liz Weir: The Glen of Stories, available from liz@lizweir.net. The Catch (2022) by Mark Wormald is published by Bloomsbury. Terry Gifford's poem 'A Shoaling at Toombeoloa Bridge' is in the collection A Feast of Fools (2018) available from t.gifford@bathspa.ac.uk.

The extract from Camille Saint-Saens's Carnival of The Animals is performed by Neal O'Doan and Nacy O'Doan (pianos) and The Seatle Youthg Orchestra conducted by Vilem Sokol. (This extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Malcolm Guite is an English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest and academic. He was until his recent retirement Chaplain at Girton College, where he continues to be a life fellow. Malcolm holds degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Durham and his research interests include the intersection of religion and the arts, and the examination of the works of Coleridge, Tolkien, C.S.Lewis and Owen Bardfield. Malcolm is the author of five books of poetry, including Sounding The Seasons: Seventy sonnets for the Christian year (Canterbury Press, 2012) and David's Crown: Sounding the Psalms (Canterbury Press, 2021). His critical books include Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination (Routledge 2012) and Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder and Stoughton, 2018).

The opening music is from String Quartet No 14, opus 13 by Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (This extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP:Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 3.0.)

The extract from Camille Saint-Saens’s Carnival of the Animals is performed by Neal O’Doan and Nancy O’Doan (pianos) and The Seattle Youth Orchestra conducted by Vilem Sokol. (This extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Catch is published by Bloomsbury (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/catch-9781526644244/), and the extract Mark reads in this podcast is from the chapter 'Stealing Trout.' Mark's reading is introduced by Katherine Robinson, a research student at Pembroke College, Cambridge who is working on the presence of the Mabinogion and other Welsh in the work of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. 

The opening music is from String Quartet No 14, opus 13 by Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (This extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP:Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 3.0.) The closing music is from Piaon Quartet in A major, D667 'The Trout' by Franz Schubert, performed by George Solchany (piano), Arpad Gerecz (violn), Vilmos Palotal (cello), Thomas Lorand (viola), Jacques Cazauran (double bass). (This recording is in the public domain.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.