Jonathan Bate, author of 'Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Biography' talks to Anne Farrar Donovan

Jonathan Bate talks to Anne Farrar Donovan, cousin of Ted Hughes, at The Oxford Research Centre. She discusses her reaction to Jonathan Bate's biography and shares her memories of Ted and the Farrar family.
Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate, is out now.
http://bit.ly/TedHughesBate

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow.

Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes.

With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of this book is Hughes’s lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, his book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes’s poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes’s own.