SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE ` Gripping & at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come` Sunday Times ` Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity.. .A moving, fascinating biography` The Times 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 & cages: Jaguar, Hawk & Crow. Event & 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 & force, of rivers, light & redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes. With an equal gift for poetry & prose, & with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children`s writer & has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality & an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love & for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of the book is Hughes`s lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest & most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes & journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems & memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes`s inner life, preserved by him for posterity. Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes`s life as it was lived, remembered & reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes`s poetry & the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes`s own.