Hugo Williams

Hugo Williams (born Hugh Anthony Mordaunt Vyner Williams on 20 February 1942) is an English poet, journalist and travel writer. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999 and Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2004.

Family and early life

Williams was born in 1942 in Windsor, Berkshire. He was the eldest child of the actor and playwright Hugh Williams and his second wife, the model, actress and playwright Margaret Vyner. His brother is the actor Simon Williams. His sister Polly, an actress, died of cancer in 2004 at the age of 54.

Hugh Williams enjoyed success as an actor during the 1930s, but his career waned following his service in the Second World War, during which he sustained injuries. He declared bankruptcy in the early 1950s but the family's fortunes revived when he and his wife began collaborating as playwrights. They found success with the comedy The Grass is Greener which was first staged in London's West End in 1956.

Hugo Williams attended Lockers Park School and Eton College. While a student at Eton, he had several poems published in the London Magazine.

Career

Poetry

Williams's early poems were influenced by poets associated with The Movement, particularly John Wain and Thom Gunn. Williams's poems appeared in The Review and The New Review, literary magazines edited by Hamilton in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1969, The Review published a pamphlet of Williams's poems as part of a series exemplifying the magazine's "taste for spare, emotionally intense, tip-of-the-iceberg, occasionally gnomic poems". In 1980, for his fourth poetry book, Love-Life, Williams shared the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize with George Szirtes. The Faber prize is awarded to "that volume of verse or prose fiction first published originally in this country during the two years preceding the year in which the award is given which is, in the opinion of the judges, of the greatest literary merit".

Williams's style evolved away from "Review-style lyrical spareness" while his subject matter became more personal and intimate in nature, culminating in his 1985 collection Writing Home, which the poet Mick Imlah called a "classic of creative autobiography". Williams credits his reading of Robert Lowell's Life Studies with the change, remarking that he was "well into my career before I started writing about mummy and daddy and all that".

Williams's 1999 book Billy's Rain won the T. S. Eliot Prize, which "is awarded annually to the best new collection of poetry in English published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland". In 2002, Faber published his Collected Poems, for which he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2004.

Billy's Rain deals with a five-year long love affair.

Other work

Williams worked as an editor at The London Magazine from 1961 to 1970. As a journalist and columnist he has written on theatre for The Sunday Correspondent (1989–1991), film for Harper's & Queen (1993–1998), popular music for Punch, and television for the New Statesman (1983–1988), where he was also poetry editor from 1984 to 1993.

He was a regular contributor to the "Freelance" column in The Times Literary Supplement from its beginning in 1988. A collection of his columns was published by Faber and Faber in 1995 as Freelancing: Adventures of a Poet.

His first book of travel writing, All the Time in the World, published in 1966, described his trip around the world at the age of 21, financed by his father in order "to break a trust fund".

Prizes and honours 1966: Eric Gregory Award 1971: Cholmondeley Award 1980: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Love-Life 1988: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature 1999: T. S. Eliot Prize for Billy's Rain 2004: Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for Collected Poems 2007: T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist for Dear Room 2007: Costa Book Award Shortlist for Dear Room