Hugo Williams is a poet, journalist and travel writer. He published his first collection, Symptoms of Loss (Oxford University Press), in 1965 and has since published at least a dozen volumes of poetry including Some Sweet Day (Oxford University Press, 1975), No Particular Place to Go (Cape, 1981), Self-Portrait with a Slide (Oxford University Press, 1990) and Billy's Rain (Faber and Faber, 1999), which won the T S Eliot Prize. His Collected Poems, which brings together work from eight books, was published by Faber in 2002.  He has recently been awarded the prestigious Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Hugo also writes a freelance column in the Times Literary Supplement and has written for New Statesman, Sunday Correspondent, Harper's & Queen and Punch.