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Summary
Alcestis is the story of a king, Admetus, who is able to escape death because his wife, Alcestis, has volunteered to die in his place. Ted Hughes’s version goes beyond translation to an inspired rethinking of the story in terms of his own vision of human suffering.
Although he started working on this piece in 1993, he did not finish until a few months before his death in 1998. It is the culmination of an extraordinarily productive period of work, which saw the publication of Tales from Ovid (1997), Birthday Letters (1998) and The Oresteia (1999).
TedHughes
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber & Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid and…
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More books by Ted Hughes
Our poem of the week is ‘Lovesong’ by Ted Hughes, from his collection, Crow.
Our Poem of the Week is 'Nightjar' by Ted Hughes, from his collection and collaboration with Leonard Baskin, Flowers and …
Our poem for New Year’s Day is ‘New Year exhilaration’ by Ted Hughes, originally published in Moortown Diary.
To celebrate publication of The Coming of the Iron Man, we spoke to illustrators Mini Grey and Chris Mould about …
To celebrate the publication of our new heritage edition of Ted Hughes' Lupercal, Faber's Editor-at-Large, Poetry, picks three poems from …
Tom Ayling selects classic Faber titles to accompany BookTok recommendations he is making on TikTok all this week.
Since its creation in 1925 Faber & Faber has always been based in or close to a Bloomsbury square, in …
Explorations of artificial intelligence – robots, computers, androids, automatons, machines – take many different forms in fiction. Here is a …
Celebrating our 90th anniversary, Faber staff take on the tricky task of selecting their three favourite Faber books.
As part of our 90th celebrations, we commissioned five printmakers to design artwork for new editions of some of Ted …