The Writers of Wales Database

HUGHES, FRIEDA

Website: http://www.friedahughes.com/frieda.cfm

Poet, children’s writer and painter, Frieda was born in London in 1960 to the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. After graduating from the Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design in 1988, she moved to Western Australia until 1997. The desert landscapes around Perth and Wooroloo formed the basis of much of her painting and poetry from this time. Frieda then settled in Powys, where she still lives, with her husband, Hungarian-born painter Laszlo Lukacs.

Freida’s poetry has been widely published, including in New Yorker, Tatler, The Spectator, Thumbscrew, The Paris Review, First Pressings, The London Magazine, The Times, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. She has written seven children’s books and five poetry collections to date. Her debut collection, entitled Wooroloo (Bloodaxe, 1998), received a Poetry Book Society special recommendation. From 2006-8 she wrote a weekly poetry column for The Times, and in 2008 was chair judge for the Forward Prizes for poetry and the National Poetry competition. Frieda has also had a short story published in Exile.

Her paintings have been exhibited worldwide, including London, Perth, Sydney and Powys. Frieda often works poetry through her visual art. In 2002 she was given an Invention and Innovation award by NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) for her project ’Forty Years’. This project was to produce forty abstract paintings which would be based on forty poems, one representing each of the first forty years of her life. The idea was to explore the emotional impact of each year on the canvas while the poems would be the ’key’ to the abstraction. As the project progressed, Frieda added five more paintings and poems to bring the project up to her forty-fifth year. Completed in 2006, the result is a four foot high, two hundred and twenty-five foot long painting in forty-five panels, which is an abstract landscape of the first forty-five years of her life.

Reviews:

"…An accomplished painter, she brings to her poetry the same landscape of contrasts, in her vivid descriptions of light and dark, struggle and release, the cleansing properties of fire. She is a courageous poet with a rich palette..."
Maura Dooley and  Jamie McKendrick, PBS Bulletin

"...This is poetry come out of siege..."
John Kinsella, Observer


Selected Publications:
Children’s books:
Getting Rid of Edna (Heinemann, 1986)
The Meal a Mile Long (Simon and Schuster, 1989)
Waldorf and the Sleeping Granny (Simon and Schuster, 1990)
The Thing in the Sink (Simon and Schuster, 1992)
Rent-a-friend (Simon and Schuster, 1994)
The Tall Story (Macdonald Young Books, 1997)
Three Scary Stories (Harper Collins, 2001)

Poetry Collections:
Wooroloo (Bloodaxe Books, 1998)
Stonepicker (Bloodaxe, 2001)
Waxworks (Bloodaxe, 2002)
Forty-Five (Harper Collins, 2006)
The Book of Mirrors (Bloodaxe, 2009)



The Book of Mirrors (Bloodaxe, 2009)

The Book of Mirrors tries to let us see ourselves as we really are. We should have the answers to all our own questions, but if we don’t see ourselves clearly – faults included – our answers can be distorted by vanities or ego.

The poems ask: What do we want from our lives? Is it worth having? What would we like to change in ourselves and our circumstances? Are arguments worth the effort? Is anything achieved by them? Death is unavoidable and all our battles are in vain in the end, so we should choose what to defend, what to fight for and how much of the quality of our lives we are prepared to sacrifice in the process. If only we could make the best of what we are, with the abilities we are given – and develop – without being distracted by the conflicts and desires that too often define us, and which are ultimately unimportant.

The Book of Mirrors examines the ideas of argument, resolution and the acceptance of what cannot be changed. It also includes poems relating to childhood memories, adolescent experiences and encounters with itinerant wildlife.

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