Hugo Williams

b. 1942

Hugo Williams was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1988.

Poet, journalist and travel writer Hugo Williams was born in 1942 in Windsor and grew up in Sussex. He was educated at Eton College and worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970. He writes a column in the Times Literary Supplement, has been poetry editor and TV critc on the New Statesman, theatre critic on the Sunday Corrrespondent, film critic for Harper’s & Queen and a writer on popular music for Punch magazine.

His Collected Poems, which brings together work from eight books, was published in 2002. His poetry collection Dear Room (2006) was shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Poetry Award, while West End Final (2009) was shortlisted for the 2009 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection and the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize. I Knew the Bride, his eleventh collection of poems, appeared in 2014 and was again shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Image credit: Caroline Forbes