Ex Libris

David Hughes was born and raised in Liverpool. He taught English literature and language from 1975 to 2004 at St Peter's School, York. When he died in 2011, he left a little over 200 poems, preoccupied with the impact of war upon the individual, the landscapes of mountainous and glacial northern Europe, the ecology of school, his friends, Wales, Liverpool, York, moments of communal celebration, his eulogy. Many of them were informed by two pivotal events which would shape his poetry. The first was his witnessing the death of his friend and colleague Barry Daniel in a mountaineering accident in 1986. The second was an incident in 2008 in which his throat was cut by a young friend, who was imprisoned for six months. During that time David wrote a series of poems about their friendship, about his forgiveness and about their differing experiences of that sentence.