British-Australian poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and London Magazine. Frieda Hughes is also an award-winning painter and author and illustrator of six books for children, including “Getting Rid of Aunt Edna” and “Waldorf and the Sleeping Granny.” Frieda is the daughter of poetry’s stellar couple, British Cambridge Poet cum Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998) and suicidal American poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963).
Her first full-length collection of poems, “Wooroloo,” 1997 combines an artistic vision with a poetic exploration of human relationships and the natural world. It has been suggested that Wooroloo is her attempt to follow in her parents’ footsteps because the title recalls Ted Hughes’ book, Wodwo, while her dedication, “For Daddy with love,” recalls Plath’s well-known poem, “Daddy.” Certainly some of Hughes’ subjects are similar to those that preoccupied her father (foxes, birds and a birdman, fish) and mother (surgery, ghosts, suicide) but she also muses on a Caesarean birth, her hysterectomy (which followed five years of endometriosis) and kookaburras. She claims that she simply shared similar experiences and interests to those of her parents. Another book of her poetry, “Stonepicker,” was released in 2001.
Hughes had a difficult early childhood. Her parents separated in 1962, and she was locked in a room at three years of age with her infant brother while her brilliant but troubled mother gassed herself in the kitchen of their cold London flat. Plath had taped the door so the gas would not reach the children. Hughes and her brother were subsequently raised by her father and stepmother in Devon, the couple protecting them from the inquisitive media.
Hughes studied art in London, traveled extensively (often by motorcycle), and eventually set up studios in the hamlet of Wooroloo, outside Perth, in isolated Western Australia. She has said, “When I came to Australia I felt a sense of relief and freedom; I could tell someone my name and they wouldn’t make the association [with my parents].” She fell in love with a rugged Australian and married him. After they broke up and her home was destroyed by bushfires, she wrote “Wooroloo.”
She has enjoyed numerous group and solo exhibitions in Australia, the U.S., and England, where her oil paintings received an award from the Royal Academy in London. She and her second husband, Hungarian-born painter Lazlo Lukacs, now make their home in the rebuilt studios at Wooroloo, also spending half the year in London where they sell their work.
Link to Wikipedia biography