Frieda Hughes will be reading at the poetry festival dedicated to her father Ted Hughes in Mexborough on 25 June at 6pm. This is the second year of the festival organised by the Ted Hughes Project, which seeks to “celebrate, commemorate and reclaim Ted Hughes” as a South Yorkshire poet.  Hughes, whose early years were spent in the Calder valley in West Yorkshire, lived in Mexborough - his family owned a newsagent’s shop at 75 Main Street - from 1938 to 1951.

In a recent Guardian article Frieda Hughes said that she didn’t allow her father to read any of her poems until she was 34. By then, she had been secretly writing poetry for a decade, filing it away in a shoebox. “I came to him with a stack of my poetry that was several inches high and asked him to put them into three piles: good, bad and indifferent. And he did – he put several into each category. He was quite good at being impartial and, with poetry, he was supremely impartial.” She hid her poetry from her father and everyone else in her life out of a desire to develop her own voice. “I had a fear of similarity. I wanted to be judged on my own merits.”

Frieda Hughes will be reading with Cathy Galvin, Mick Jenkinson and Helen Mort at Mexborough Business Centre. More festival details