SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come' Sunday Times 'Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity . A moving, fascinating biography' The Times Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain's most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats.

With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of the book is Hughes's lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, preserved by him for posterity. Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes's poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes's own. Gold title * With huge PR and launch, this book is set to be the 'Charles Dickens: A Life' (TCM 140k) of 2015. * To be published on national Poetry Day.

A film made by Matchlight TV for BBC2 featuring Jonathan as both consultant and key interviewee has been extended from 60mins to 90mins prime-time. TX tbc. * Bate's 'John Clare' won the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being short listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and the South Bank Show Award. In America it won the NAMI Book Award. 'The Genius of Shakespeare' was praised by Sir Peter Hall, founder of the RSC, as 'the best modern book on Shakespeare'. 'Soul of the Age' was runner-up for the PEN American Center's PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for the best biography of the year. * Ted Hughes' 'Birthday Letters' (TCM 250k) are the biggest selling poetry collection on record. They were awarded the Forward Poetry Prize, the T.

S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Whitbread Poetry and Whitbread British Book of the Year prizes. * Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar' (TCM 300k) and 'Ariel' (TCM 150k)continue to sell in massive numbers.