Welcome to the Ted Hughes Society podcast, and the latest in our series Meet Our Folks, in which prominent society members talk about themselves and their particular interest in the life and work of Ted Hughes. Our guest for this episode,Terry Gifford, is a poet, climber, former chair of the Ted Hughes Society. Terry is undoubtedly one of the foremost Ted Hughes scholars, a leading critic of the work of D.H.Lawrence and a pioneer in the field of eco-criticism. His many publications include Ted Hughes, a critical study co-authored with Neil Roberts and published by Faber & Faber in 1981; Teaching Advanced Level English Literature: a student-centred approach (with John Brown, Routledge 1989); Reconnecting with John Muir (University of Georgia Press, 2006); Ted Hughes in the Routledge Guides to Literature series (2009); The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011); Ted Hughes in Context, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018; Pastoral in the Routledge New Critical Idiom series (2019); and Reading and D.H.Lawrence in the Anthropocene (Edinburgh University Press 2025). A selection of Terry’s varied, skilful and engaging poetry A Feast of Fools, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2018.
Until his retirement in 2004, Terry was Reader in Literature and Environment at the University of Leeds. He was the Director of Research in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries and introduced practice-based Ph.D. programmes at Leeds in theatre, dance and creative writing. And for 21 years, until 2008, he was the founding director of the annual International Festival of Mountaineering Literature. Terry is at present a visiting scholar at the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, and is currently Profesor Honorifico at the Universidad de Alicante, Spain, where he co-supervises Ph.D. students in ecocriticism.
In this episode, Terry reflects on his working life in education - starting as a school teacher and then acquiring the knowledge, qualification and experience to teach in universities; as a scholar, particularly of Ted Hughes and D.H. Lawrence; but running through Terry’s talk, like a strong thread linking his various projects and interests is collaboration and partnership.
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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