Birthday Letters is a 1998 poetry collection by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes' death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 1999.[1] This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized, and "explosive" marriage. Prior to Birthday Letters, Hughes had only explicitly mentioned Plath once before, in a poem titled 'Heptonstall Cemetery' from his 1979 collection Remains of Elmet.[2]
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