The Letters for Ted Hughes' Birthday are addressed, with only two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, starting a few years after her suicide in 1963, and they comprise Ted Hughes' only account of his relationship with Plath and the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an immediate bestseller when it was published in 1998 and won the Forward Prize for Poetry that same year. 'To read [Letters for Birthday] is to experience the mental equivalent of "sinking." It takes you down to pressure levels where the subjective truths of sorrow and endurance leave you astounded.' - Seamus Heaney. 'Even if it were possible to set aside its biographical value... its linguistic, technical, and imaginative achievements will secure its future. Hughes is one of the most important poets of the century, and this is his greatest work.' - Andrew Motion