Few things could be as certain as the posthumous triumph of the poet Ted Hughes, who has won the 1998 Whitbread Book of the Year.
Having taken the Whitbread Poetry prize two weeks ago, his last book, a long conversational sequence, Birthday Letters, was last night awarded the £21,000 prize at a ceremony in London.
Hughes, the bookies' favourite for the prize, died in October at the age of 68; in this last book he not only achieved a critical success but also won new readers, drawn by the final breaking of his long silence about his short, unhappy marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath.
This poetry book, which introduced a conversational tone to Hughes's more characteristically austere voice, has dominated best-seller lists and featured in various literary round-ups and choices since its publication a year ago. It is the fastest-selling collection of poetry this century and has already won other prizes including the T.S. Eliot Prize. Several factors make his victory interesting.
Firstly, he is the first writer not only to win the prize twice, but to win it in two successive years. In 1997 he took the Whitbread with his finest book, the magnificent Tales from Ovid, a robustly graceful performance, full of life and rage and passion.
Secondly, it is significant to note that both poetry collections were competing against the vastly more popular categories of fiction - there are two fiction prizes - and biography.
Thirdly, the Whitbread is rarely controversial. Although never quite achieving the popularity and high profile of the oft-maligned Booker Prize, the Whitbread is best known for picking the best books.
In this instance there would always be those who could argue that Birthday Letters has a more voyeuristic than literary appeal. There is the fascination that, having maintained silence for so many years on the subject of his relationship with Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 and whose ghost and subsequent myth were to haunt not only Hughes's life but to overshadow his work as a poet, he ultimately brought out a collection about it.
It is interesting on a human level to see this famously reticent man, the British poet laureate since 1984, address Plath directly, as he does in all but two of the poems.
It comes as no surprise to see him win and indeed this year's Whitbread as well as Birthday Letters have clearly the quality of voices from the grave.
However, it is also something of a triumph for Hughes that the quality of his book is clearly superior to that of the other three contenders. In this instance literary merit certainly outweighs the potential gimmickry of a posthumous award. The other books which had already won prizes in their individual categories and were in competition for the overall Whitbread Book of the Year title were the biography Georgina Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman; The Last King of Scot- land by Giles Foden which had won the First Novel category; and Leading the Cheers by Justin Cartwright ,the winner in the Novel category.
The award was accepted by Hughes's daughter by Sylvia Plath, Frieda Hughes, and the ceremony was broadcast on BBC2. The chairman of the judges, the Rt Hon Raymond Seitz, former US ambassador to Britain said: "In the end we simply asked ourselves which single book would we most want to take to the top of a mountain." Birthday Letters he described as "the powerful poetry of Ted Hughes at its most eloquent, personal and moving".
