Glyn Hughes Biography

British poet and novelist, born in Middlewich, Cheshire, educated at the Regional College of Art, Manchester. He worked as an art teacher from 1956 to 1973, when he became a full-time writer. His principal collections of verse are Neighbours (1970), Rest the Poor Struggler (1972), Alibis and Convictions (1978), and Best of Neighbours: New and Selected Poems (1979). His poetry, like much of his fiction, is characterized by the depth of its imaginative involvement with social, historical, and topographical aspects of the Pennine regions of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Where I Used To Play on the Green (1982), his first novel, is based on the life of William Grimshaw, the eighteenth-century Yorkshire Methodist; Mary Hepton's Heaven (produced in 1984) is his adaptation of the book for the stage. His subsequent novels include The Hawthorn Goddess (1984) and The Rape of the Rose (1987), treatments of the social upheaval wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and Roth (1992), the main protagonist of which is an emotionally disturbed painter. Among his other works is Millstone Grit (1975), a guide to the Pennines.