This special Christmas edition of the Ted Hughes Society podcast, and the society’s gift to all lovers of fine poetry, is a reading by Matt Howard from his second collection Broadlands, published earlier this year by Bloodaxe Books. 

Matt is a member of a gifted generation of younger poets who have found inspiration and encouragement in their work from reading the poetry of Ted Hughes. Matt was born in Norfolk in 1978 and is a poet and environmentalist who has worked in various roles for the RSPB for more than a decade. He is currently manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre.

Matt’s first collection, Gall,  was published by in 2018 and won the inaugural Laurel Prize for Best First Collection in 2020 and the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize.

Matt has been poet in residence for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and also the Wordsworth Trust. Since 2018 he has been a trustee of The Rialto, and was Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds 2021-2023.

The Ted Hughes `society would like to thank Bloodaxe Books for their co-operation in making this podcast and for their permission to record and share this selection of poems from Broadlands. 

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at membership@thetedhughessociety.org

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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