The Yorkshire Roots of Ted Hughes

Contact: michelle@key-words.co.uk

This panel event will bring together specialists in local history, writers, and personal friends of Ted Hughes, who will discuss how his poetry was inspired by the contrasting experiences of his childhood in the Calder Valley and his teenage experiences in Mexborough in South Yorkshire.

Ted Hughes’s poetry was shaped by both the landscape and the culture of these two regions of Yorkshire and, courtesy of the Elmet Trust, we are pleased to welcome to the festival the film-maker and local historian Nick Wilding, the writer Steve Ely, and Ted’s lifelong friend Donald Crossley, who played with him as a child on the streets of the village where they both lived.

The event will comprise an intriguing mixture of reminiscence, photos and filmed extracts, as Nick, Steve and Donald paint a picture of the two very different worlds that would be such an important influence on the future poetry of a man who was destined to become one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.

The Elmet Trust is a community-based organisation formed in 2007 to celebrate the poetry of Ted Hughes. The Trust owns and manages the Ted Hughes birthplace in Mytholmroyd, where Hughes was born in 1930 and spent the first years of his life.

Price: £1.50

Time: 2:00pm