Frieda Hughes


Frieda Rebecca Hughes is an English-Australian poet and painter. She has published seven children's books, four poetry collections and one short story and has had many exhibitions.

Family and personal life

Hughes is the daughter of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Her mother was an American novelist and poet and her father was the British poet laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998. Her mother died by suicide when Frieda was almost three; her father died of a heart attack. Hughes's brother, Nicholas Hughes, died by suicide on 16 March 2009.
Hughes was born in London. Through their father's mother, Frieda and Nicholas are descendants of Nicholas Ferrar. She moved to Perth, Western Australia in 1988, and later settled in Wooroloo, a small hamlet north of Perth, in 1991, where the Australian landscape became the basis of much of her painting. She became an Australian citizen in 1992. She lived in England from 1998 to 2004, when she moved to Wales.
Hughes was married to farmworker Desmond Dawe from 1979 to 1982. Her second husband was real estate agent Clive Anderson. Her third marriage, in 1996, was to Hungarian artist Laszlo Lukacs; they divorced in 2010 after a year-long separation. She has no children.

Career

Hughes graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, with a BA in 1988.
In June 2002, she received an Invention and Innovation award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts or her project Forty Years.
From 2006 to 2008 she wrote a weekly poetry column for The Times newspaper and in 2008 was chair judge for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and a judge for the National Poetry Competition.
In February 2010 she was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion programme on BBC Radio 3.
In October 2015 Hughes spoke for the first time about her father as part of the BBC Two documentary Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death.

Exhibitions