In hilarious verse Ted Hughes introduces us to his extraordinary family, including a Granny who happens to be an octopus and his father, the Chief Inspector of Holes.

'Other folks ...

What has happened to the lost art of memorising poetry? Why do we no longer feel that it is necessary to know the most enduring, beautiful poems in the English ...

Ffangs lives with the other vampires on Vampire Island, but he is different from the rest - he can’t stand the sight of blood!

When he arrives in London, everyone ...

‘The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles. For centuries it was considered a more or ...

First published in 1983, River celebrates fluvial landscapes, their creatures and their regenerative powers. Inspired by Hughes’s love of fishing and by his environmental activism, the poems are a ...

In Scotland is a Loch.
At the bottom of this Lock, in the pitch black,
A monster lives, called Nessie ...

Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, is tired of being told ...

Long ago when the world was brand new all the creatures were pretty much alike. But with practice, and in all kinds of ways, they became altogether different ...

Why are ...

A selection of Ted Hughes's wonderfully vivid children's fiction, read by the author and selected and introduced by Michael Morpurgo.

These stories have delighted children for years and ...

Ted Hughes (1930-98) was one of the giants of twentieth-century poetry. His vast and multifaceted output, which challenged and stimulated generations of readers is now a permanent monument. His voice ...

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their ...

'In a series of chapters built round poems by a number of writers including himself . . . [Ted Hughes] explores, colourfully and intensively, themes such as 'Capturing Animals', 'Wind and Weather' and ...

This collection brings together the poems Ted Hughes wrote throughout his life for children. They are arranged by volume, beginning with those younger readers and progressing to the more complex ...

For this new edition, first published in 1971, Ted Hughes augmented his original selection of Shakespeare's poems and dramatic speeches and completely rewrote his accompanying essay, intending to restore ...

The achievement of Ted Hughes as a poet is inseparable from his achievement as a translator of poetry and poetic drama. Throughout a long and intensely productive career, Hughes was ...

Originally published in 1979, Moortown Diary is the updated version of Ted Hughes's acclaimed Devon farming sequence, written over a period of several years during which he was spending ...

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their ...

From his remarkable debut The Hawk in the Rain (1957) to his death in 1998, Ted Hughes was a colossal presence in the English literary landscape. The Collected Poems represents ...

Full of the power and fantastic imagination of his famous book The Iron Man , this sequel from the late Poet Laureate is a passionate and brilliant cry against the relentless ...

Conceived of as a collection of the editors' own favourite poems, The Rattle Bag has established itself as the classic anthology of our time. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes have ...

A companion to The Rattle Bag , The School Bag is an engaging and authoritative selection for the classroom.

Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes have chosen an eclectic range of poets ...

Mankind must put a stop to the dreadful destruction by the Iron Man and set a trap for him, but he cannot be kept down. Then, when a terrible monster ...

Ted Hughes wrote a series of stories for children from the early 1960s through until 1995 about how the world, and the creatures in it, came into being. They are ...

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their ...

Right from the beginning, Ted Hughes (1930-98) wrote in a way that set him apart from his contemporaries, as Simon Armitage puts it in his introduction. By the time he ...

Published in 1957, Hawk in the Rain was Ted Hughes's first collection of poems. It won the New York Poetry Centre First Publication Award, for which the judges were ...

When Sylvia Plath's Ariel was published posthumously, A. Alvarez in the Observer wrote: 'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open ...

This volume contains all Sylvia Plath's mature poetry written from 1956 up to her death in 1963.

The text is preceded by an introduction by Ted Hughes and followed ...

When Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun's ground-breaking anthology After Ovid (also Faber) was published in 1995, Hughes's three contributions to the collective effort were nominated by most critics ...

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more ...

This volume contains six plays by Ted Hughes which are particularly suitable for performance by children. Four of them were published originally under the title, The Coming of the Kings ...

Crow was Ted Hughes's fourth book of poems for adults and a pivotal moment in his writing career. In it, he found both a structure and a persona that ...

This volume replaced Ted Hughes's Selected Poems 1957-1981. It contains a larger selection from the same period, to which are added poems from more recent books, uncollected poems from ...

'The poem we are told was originally intended as a film scenario. Ted Hughes has that sure poetic instinct that heads implacably for the particular instances rather than ideas or ...

Alcestis is the story of a king, Admetus, who is able to escape death because his wife, Alcestis, has volunteered to die in his place. Ted Hughes's version goes ...

The Oresteia comprises three of the greatest plays of all time: Agamemnon , The Cheophori and The Eumenides . Concerned with the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War as it affects the ...

'These nine pieces hang together, in my mind, as an accompaniment to my poems'. So wrote Ted Hughes in the foreword to this collection, taken from forty years of occasional ...

Lorca's Blood Wedding is a classic of twentieth-century theatre. The story is based on a newspaper fragment which told of a family vendetta and a bride who ran away ...

Coleridge's flawed genius has fascinated people for almost 200 years. His greatest poems have a quality which sets them apart from - and perhaps above - those of even his most ...

Animals of air, land and sea are brilliantly imagined in this perfect introduction for young readers to the work of Ted Hughes. Part of Hughes's Collected Animal Poems, The Iron ...

From the trembling new-born calf in Season Songs to the gently sleeping one recorded in Moortown Diary , animal life as observed in the pages of Flowers and Insects , Elmet , River ...

All the richness of the wild is seen through the poet's eye. Here are poems from Hawk in the Rain , Wodwo , Wolfwatching , Lupercal and River as well as from ...

In 1984 Ted Hughes was made Poet Laureate. Since then, he has fulfilled his duties by writing a number of poems celebrating important royal occasions. These are major works, calling ...

First published in 1962 this selection, made by the poets themselves, draws on the volumes they had published up to that date and forms a valuable introduction to their work.

Ted Hughes was one of the greatest poets of the natural world, and no less so when he wrote for children. In this remarkable collection of poems he gives voice ...

Most of the poems in this book were written by Ted Hughes in response to Fay Godwin's photographs of the part of Yorkshire in which he grew up. Their ...

In The Mermaid's Purse, Ted Hughes introduces us to a marvellous array of characters who live in and around the sea, among them a bashful mussel, a boastful limpet ...