Video: Ted Hughes Biographer Jonathan Bate

It is so hard to extricate the life of Ted Hughes from that of Sylvia Plath – harder still to talk of Hughes life without the conversation turning to Plath’s death. But the focus of Bate’s new book is very much Hughes – of course it includes the affect Plath, and her writing, had on him – but this is a book about one poet. Hence the controversy.

Drawing on Hughes’ archive of unpublished materials – journals, letters and poems – Bate has written Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. And with it, he hopes to keep the achievements of one of Britain's greatest poets alive.

Watch him explain how the book took shape: