Hugo Williams (Hugo Mordaunt Williams) Biography

British poet, born in Windsor, educated at Eton; he was on the staff of London Magazine from 1960 to 1970, when he became a freelance writer. Symptoms of Loss (1965), his first collection of verse, displayed the combination of restraint and candour that have remained essential aspects of his highly individual tone. Sugar Daddy (1970) and Some Sweet Day (1975) contained many short and acutely observed poems exemplifying the poetic minimalism of the early 1970s. A fourth collection, Love-Life (1979), saw the development of more discursive modes. Writing Home (1985) gained Williams wide recognition as a poet of unusual sensitivity and assurance for its autobiographical exploration of boyhood and youth. An autobiographical perspective is also central to Self-Portrait with a Slide (1990); numerous poems reintroduce ‘Sonny Jim’, an uneasy persona who featured repeatedly in earlier verse. First Poems (1985), Selected Poems (1989), and Dock Leaves (1994) are among recent collections. All the Time in the World (1966) and No Particular Place To Go (1981) are prose accounts of his travels.