Glyn Hughes

The writer and broadcaster Glyn Hughes was born in Cheshire.

He trained as a painter at Manchester College of Art.

In the 1960s, he began writing novels and poetry, much of it inspired by his life in the Calder Valley. He moved to Calderdale, and lived and died in the cottage at Mill Bank which he rebuilt from a ruin and which became his spiritual home.

He has written novels, poetry and books about the district, including

• Millstone Grit [1976]: One of his most popular early works which takes the form of a 50-mile walk through the West Riding and East Lancashire. It includes his own thoughts on how he came to settle in the village of Mill Bank, near Ripponden, in the early 1970s
• Yorkshire: Millstone Grit Revisited: the updated version [1985]
• Life Class: a 5,000-line autobiographical poem covering his rural working-class roots, his life in Calderdale and Greece and his three marriages

He has won national prizes and awards for his poetry. The Times named him as one of the six best authors ever on the north of England.

He wrote and broadcast on the Brontës and subjects including a series following a journey across the north called The Long Causeway.

He was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize for his first novel, Where I used to play on the green.

His The Antique Collector was short-listed for the Whitbread Novel of the Year.

He has written several radio plays, including:

• Pursuit, a play about the artist J. M. W. Turner [1999]
• Lowry's Loves, a play about the artist L. S. Lowry and his adopted daughter [2001]
• Glorious John, a play about the conductor Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra [2002]
• When Twilight Falls, a verse play about a family who make a trip to Blackpool to hear Josef Locke sing [2004]
• Brontë, a fictionalised life of the Brontë family [2003]

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