Glyn Hughes UK

Glyn Hughes lived in West Yorkshire, a place that inspired much of his work. He also lived for a long period in Greece. His first full collection of poetry, Neighbours (1970) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Arts Council of Wales Poetry Prize. It was followed by further collections: Rest The Poor Struggler (1972); and Best of Neighbours: New & Selected Poems (1979); Dancing Out of the Dark Side (2005); and Life Class (2009).

His first novel was Where I Used to Play on the Green (1982), winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. It was followed by further novels, The Hawthorn Goddess (1984); The Rape of the Rose (1987); The Antique Collector (1990), set in the Pennines and short-listed for the 1990 Whitbread Novel Award; Roth (1992); and Brontë (1996), a fictionalised life of the Brontë family.

His books Millstone Grit (1975), revised and republished as Millstone Grit: A Pennine Journey (1987), Fair Prospects (1976) and Glyn Hughes' Yorkshire (1985) are works of autobiography. He was also the editor of Samuel Laycock: Selected Poems (1981).

He wrote a number of plays for stage (Mary Hepton's Heaven, 1984), television and radio, including three verse plays for children. His other radio plays are Pursuit, Mr Lowry's Loves, Glorious John, When Twilight Falls and Dreams of a Working Man, all produced for Radio 4 in Birmingham. His radio features include The Red Room (about Charlotte Brontë), Millstone Grit Revisited and The Long Causeway, a series about crossing the Pennines.

He performed his work worldwide. He was an Arts Council Fellow, and held Writer in Residence positions at Bishop Grosseteste College, Lincoln, at Farnborough Library, Hampshire, and for the D. H. Lawrence Centenary Festival, Nottingham. Glyn was also a painter who exhibited widely in the North of England.

He died in May 2011.