Ted Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 in Mytholmroyd, a small mill town in West Yorkshire. His father made portable wooden buildings. The family moved to Mexborough, a coal-mining town in South Yorkshire, when Hughes was seven. His parents took over a newsagent and tobacconist shop, and eventually he went to the local grammar school. In 1948 Hughes won an Open Exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge. Before going there, he served two years National Service in the Royal Air Force. Between leaving Cambridge and becoming a teacher, he worked at various jobs, finally as a script-reader for Rank at their Pinewood Studios. In 1956 Hughes married the American poet Sylvia Plath, who died in 1963, and they had two children. He remarried in 1970. He was awarded the OBE in 1977, created Poet Laureate in December 1984 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1998. He died in October 1998. Ted Hughes's first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published by Faber in 1957. He published poetry, fiction and prose for both adults and children, as well as acclaimed translations. He also edited a number of poetry anthologies, including (with Seamus Heaney) The Rattle Bag and The School Bag. He won many awards including First Prize in the Guinness Poetry Awards in 1958, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1974 and the Guardian's Children's Fiction Award in 1985. In 1997 he won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for Tales from Ovid, and repeated this success the following year with Birthday Letters, which was also awarded both the T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry, and named Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

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