Welcome to the latest Ted Hughes Society podcast. Our guest for this episode in the series Meet Our Folks is the British literary critic and academic Neil Roberts. Neil specializes in modern English literature, particularly the works of 20th-century poets and novelists in books that explore themes of nature, culture in the works of authors such as D.H. Lawrence, Peter Redgrove and, of course, Ted Hughes.

Neil attended at Latymer Upper School in London and Clare College where he was awarded his BA , MA and PhD in English, laying the foundations for a distinguished career as a scholar and critic of modernist authors and poetry. Neil has published many highly respected books including Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove (Jonathan Cape, 2015) and Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel (Clemson University Press, 2019) and, co-edited with Terry Gifford and Mark Wormald, Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) which through close readings of his poetry examines Hughes's engagement with environmental themes.

Neil has collaborated extensively with fellow scholars, most notably Terry Gifford, on critical studies of Ted Hughes, which Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (Faber & Faber 1981), which pioneered ecocritical readings of Hughes' work, and Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (Cambridge University Press 2013), which Neil and Terry coedited with Mark Wormald, and which traces the development of Hughes’s poetic voice from student poet to Poet Laureate.

Neil has played a key role in advancing Ted Hughes studies, through organizing seminars, readings and most notably the Seventh International Ted Hughes Conference at the University of Sheffield, publishing articles in The Ted Hughes Society Journal, and more recently Ted Hughes Studies and Recklings. Neil has also served as a leading member of the council of the Ted Hughes Society, where he is at present Treasurer.

if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast; it does help others who might be interested in poetry, or the work of Ted Hughes, to find the podcast.

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

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