Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.
Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.
Thomson William "Thom" Gunn was an English poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement, and his later poetry in America, even after moving towards a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn wrote about. He won major literary awards; his best poems were said to have a compact philosophical elegance.
Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Miroslav Holub was a Czech poet and immunologist.
Christopher John Reid, FRSL is a British poet, essayist, cartoonist, and writer. In January 2010 he won the 2009 Costa Book Award for A Scattering, written as a tribute to his late wife, the actress Lucinda Gane. Beside winning the poetry category, Reid became the first poet to take the overall Costa Book of the Year since Seamus Heaney in 1999. He had been nominated for Whitbread Awards in 1996 and in 1997.
Assia Esther Wevill was a German Jewish woman who escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Palestine, via Italy, then later the United Kingdom, where she had an affair with the English poet Ted Hughes. While she was a successful advertising copywriter and a talented translator of poetry, she is mainly remembered in the context of her relationships with Sylvia Plath and Hughes.
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, poet, playwright, novelist and scholar. He specialises in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education.
Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. On 1 October 2019, she took up the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Julia Copus FRSL is a British poet, biographer and children's writer.
Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow is a literary work by poet Ted Hughes, first published in 1970 by Faber and Faber, and one of Hughes' most important works. Writing for the Ted Hughes Society journal in 2012, Neil Roberts, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, said:
Crow holds a uniquely important place in Hughes [sic] oeuvre. It heralds the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism. Hughes wrote Crow, mostly between 1966 and 1969, after a barren period following the death of Sylvia Plath. He looked back on the years of work on Crow as a time of imaginative freedom and creative energy, which he felt that he never subsequently recovered. He described Crow as his masterpiece...
George Worsley Adamson, RE, MCSD was a book illustrator, writer, and cartoonist, who held American and British dual citizenship from 1931.
John Glenday grew up in Monifieth.
The Colossus and Other Poems is a poetry collection by American poet Sylvia Plath, first published by Heinemann, in 1960. It is the only volume of poetry by Plath that was published before her death in 1963.
The Hawk in the Rain is a collection of 40 poems by the British poet Ted Hughes. Published by Faber and Faber in 1957, it was Hughes's first book of poetry. The book received immediate acclaim in both England and America, where it won the Galbraith Prize. Many of the book's poems imagine the real and symbolic lives of animals, including a fox, a jaguar, and the eponymous hawk. Other poems focus on erotic relationships, and on stories of the First World War, Hughes's father being a survivor of Gallipoli.
Remains of Elmet is a collection of poems by Ted Hughes published in 1979. In this book Hughes has poetically covered the region of Elmet. The book contains black and white photographs by Fay Godwin, taken in the barren hill country of West Yorkshire, Hughes's birthplace.
Daniel Weissbort was a poet, translator, multilingual academic and founder and editor of the literary magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. He died at the age of 78, and was buried in the Brompton Cemetery in west London.
Daniel Huws is the world's leading authority of the last hundred years on Welsh manuscripts, with contributions that are held to represent a significant advance on those of John Gwenogvryn Evans.
Rain-charm for the Duchy is a book of poems by Ted Hughes. The book contains poems written by Hughes during his tenure as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, from 1984. The poems in the book celebrate royal occasions. The book was first published by Faber and Faber in 1992.
