Ted Hughes lived in a market town on the edge of Dartmoor for many years and wrote a significant proportion of his work including poems, plays, stories and librettos while there.
Leonard Baskin, his American-born friend and internationally renowned artist, collaborated with Hughes on some of his most celebrated collections, and a selection of these will also be on show at the event in November.
The recording of their conversation will be set to a series of images of their work, followed by a panel discussion with friend and filmmaker Noel Chanan, poet Alice Oswald and the artists’ widows Lisa Unger Baskin and Carol Hughes.
The conversation recording covers 25 years of Hughes’s best-known books, from The Hawk in the Rain in the 1950s to Under the North Star in the 1980s.
Speaking before the tenth anniversary of her husband’s death, Carol Hughes said: “As much of Ted and Leonard’s collaborative partnership took place during the Baskin’s years living in the south west, it seems appropriate that our own collection of Baskin proofs and drawings should join the holding of ‘Cave Birds’ which forms the principle Hughes collection at Exeter University.”
The event follows on from the recent announcement of the acquisition of Ted Hughes’s archive for the nation at the British Library.
For further information visit the University of Exeter's website www.exeter.ac.uk/
