About The Ted Hughes Network

About the Ted Hughes Network

The Ted Hughes Network is a public-facing research centre based in the English Literature and Creative Writing subject area at the University of Huddersfield. Ted Hughes was born, raised, and was formed as a poet in Yorkshire and maintained strong links with the county throughout his life. He was born and spent his early childhood only twelve miles from Huddersfield, in Mytholmroyd in the Upper Calder Valley. At the age of eight, his family moved to Mexborough, about thirty miles from Huddersfield, in what is now South Yorkshire.

Hughes came of age and became a poet in Mexborough, but he also spent two important National Service years in Patrington, East Yorkshire, before going up to Cambridge in 1951. Hughes was formed in Yorkshire, and it is Huddersfield’s topographical location at the heart of Hughes’s Yorkshire that makes it a fitting place for the location of the Ted Hughes Network.

The work of the Network is led by its Director, Steve Ely.  Steve has sought to develop an international scholarly community and has forged links with universities in the United States and France and with the Ted Hughes Society. A number of postgraduate students are currently researching into Hughes’s work, including Hughes’s Elmet poems and Hughes’s relationships with other modern and contemporary poets. The Ted Hughes Network has also begun to shape the undergraduate curriculum, with Hughes-related content being taught on English literature and creative writing modules.

The networking function of the Ted Hughes Network extends beyond the academic world, and the THN has working relationships with the Elmet Trust, Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire), Calderdale Council, Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council, Hebden Royd Town Council, Mexborough Business Centre, Mexborough Heritage Society, Patrington Parish Council and Royd Regeneration. This group of partners formed a consortium which, in 2021, launched the Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire literary and heritage trail maps. In recent years new partnerships have been developed, with the Fox Gallery, the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank, Pennine Heritage and the friends of Heptonstall Museum Trust. We are delighted to say that our work is generously supported by Hughes’s wife, Carol.

Since its formation, the Ted Hughes Network has facilitated a range of academic, engagement and impact activities. In 2017 we ran a highly successful conference on Ted Hughes and Place at the University’s Heritage Quay, with over twenty papers presented by leading figures in the field. Two issues of the Ted Hughes Society Journal were devoted to papers arising from this conference, including a Special Issue guest-edited by James Underwood. In 2018 the Network hosted The Motley Muse, an event celebrating the diversity of contemporary poetry and run in partnership with the Poetry Centre at the University of Leeds. In 2021 the Network ran a range of launch activities – poetry readings, poetry in the landscape events, guided walks and school workshops, in order to launch the Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire project. In 2022 the Network hosted the triennial Ted Hughes Society conference, and, in the same year, in partnership with Professor John Goodby of Sheffield Hallam University, organised two one day symposia focused on the poetry of the 1940s and its legacies: Apocalypse I & Apocalypse II. In January 2023, Steve Ely began a two-year AHRC-funded research project, Ted Hughes’s Expressionism, which produced a number of outputs, including a symposium held at the British Library in September 2023, a poetry-writing short-course, competition and anthology (Apocalyptic Landscape) and a number of journal and conference papers.

The THN has also developed a number of significant Ted Hughes collections, which are held at the university’s archive at Heritage Quay. These include an almost complete collection of Hughes’s limited edition and small press work, purchased with generous financial support by the University. In 2022, with funding from the Friends of the National Libraries, the ACE/V&A Purchase Fund, the National Lottery Memorial Fund and the University, we acquired the internationally significant Mark Hinchliffe Ted Hughes Collection. Mark was a Huddersfield-based poet and Hughes collector—and great supporter of the Network—who died tragically young in 2019. Heritage Quay also holds the Donald Crossley papers, and the Christopher Reid papers. Donald was a childhood friend of Hughes who re-contacted him in later life; their correspondence and related documents as related to Hughes’s Elmet poems make up the major part of this deposit. The poet Christopher Reid was Hughes’s editor at Faber & Faber. His deposit comprises the papers related to his editing of the Selected Letters of Ted Hughes in 2007. In 2024, the THN was very pleased to accept a large and valuable donation of Hughes’s small press and limited edition work from his wife Carol. The Ted Hughes Archive also holds a range of other Hughes-related items, including recordings of interviews, copies of the Mexborough Grammar School magazine the Don & Dearne, and some unique items, such as A Bundle of Birds, a holograph ‘fine book’ made by Hughes for his sister Olwyn. All of these items are accessible to scholars and the general public.