Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

Frieda Hughes's fables cast light on two worlds, giving mythic dimension to contemporary life - depicting with an artist's keen eye the particular nature of beast, fish and fowl. Strange creatures, fabled beings, and inner voices come to life in startling poems set both in city streets and hospitals as well as in psychic landscapes and reinvented tales.

Frieda Hughes's first collection of poems extends the distinctive imaginative territory of her paintings and children's books. In the fairytale world of Wooroloo, light defines dark while dark extends its shadows into the brightest of lives. Fire is the dominant element of these poems: as in her recent paintings, created phoenix-like from the bushfire which destroyed her studio in Wooroloo, her once paradisal home in Australia.

The self she depicts is tested by loss, danger, fear and abandonment, yet transformed through experience into a world beyond nihilism and despair: a place which makes possible truth, strength, hope and the redemptive powers of love. Though a writer of unusual literary pedigree, she is first and foremost an original voice, with her own compelling stories to tell.

Frieda Hughes was born in London in 1960, grew up in Devon, and after living in various parts of England and Australia now lives on the Welsh Borders. She wrote and painted from an early age, and for many years has been a painter and childrenís writer. She has published four poetry collections with Bloodaxe: Wooroloo (1999), Stonepicker (2001), Waxworks (2002) and The Book of Mirrors (2009).