Ted Hughes biography: publisher calls estate's attack 'defamatory'

HarperCollins defends book as a work of ‘impeccable scholarship’ after the Hughes estate accuses author Jonathan Bate of factual inaccuracy 

Contested accounts ... Ted Hughes in 1966. Photograph: Jane Bown

Alison Flood

Monday 19 October 2015  The Guardian

Bate began work on the biography in 2010, initially with the support of the estate. But this was withdrawn in 2014, and the book’s publication this month, as an “unauthorised life”, prompted the Hughes estate to issue a letter last week calling on Bate and his publisher HarperCollins to “apologise for significant errors of fact, as well as damaging and offensive claims, concerning the poet’s widow, Mrs Carol Hughes”, which appear in the book.

But in a new statement, HarperCollins called the Ted Hughes estate’s comments “defamatory”, describing Bate’s book as “a work of first-rate scholarship” which has been “impeccably researched over the course of five years”. More