Hugo Williams
Hugo Williams’ provocative poetry is modern and accessible. Ben Wilkinson of ContemporaryWriters.com is a huge fan and hails the final lines of Rhetorical Questions as a “pitch-perfect description of sexual pleasure”: ‘Do you think I mind / when the blank expression comes / and you set off alone / down the hall of collapsing columns?’
Born in 1942 in Windsor, non-fiction writer and poet, Hugo Williams, was educated at Eton College and has received over five major awards for his work. He was the poetry editor and TV critic for the New Statesman, a theatre critic for the Sunday Correspondent, a film critic for Harper’s & Queen and a writer on popular music for Punch. Williams attributes his early love of poetry to the movement poet Thom Gunn, combined with his passion for writing and pop music.
Williams’ work includes Some Sweet Day (1975) which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Billy’s Rain (1999) for which he won the T.S. Eliot Prize, his Collected Poems (2002), a collection of eight prior works, and recent poetry collection Dear Room (2006), which was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry and the TS Eliot awards. He received the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 2004. His latest collection, West End Final, was nominated for the Forward Prize and the TS Eliot Prize.
He currently lives in London and writes a column in the Times Literary Supplement.
“Hugo Williams is exactly how you want a poet to be, almost as if ‘poet’ was a part he landed in an extremely long-running play. He lives in a tiny house in Islington - famously unmodernised.”
The Guardian
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