The Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid, begins when Hughes was seventeen, and documents a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to other lives, and to the world we live and communicate in.

At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter-writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art which combines writing and talking. This selection begins when Hughes was seventeen, and documents the course of a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to other lives (including a readership comprising both adults and children); a life pared down to essentials and yet eventful, peripatetic, at times publicly controversial.