Hugo Williams (born Hugh Anthony Mordaunt Vyner Williams) is an English poet, journalist and travel writer. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999 and Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2004. Family and early life Williams was born in 1942 in Windsor. He was the eldest child of the actor and playwright Hugh Williams and his second wife, the model, actress and playwright Margaret Vyner. His brother is the actor Simon Williams. His sister Polly, an actress, died of cancer in 2004 at the age of 54. Hugh Williams had been a successful actor in the 1930s but his career declined after his service in the Second World War, in which he had been wounded. He declared bankruptcy in the early 1950s but the family's fortunes revived when he and his wife began collaborating as playwrights. They found success with the comedy The Grass is Greener which was first staged in London's West End in 1956. Hugo Williams attended Lockers Park School and Eton College. While a student at Eton, he had several poems published in The London Magazine. Career Poetry Williams's early poems were influenced by poets associated with The Movement, particularly John Wain and Thom Gunn. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his first book of poems, Symptoms of Loss, which was published in 1965. Philip Larkin included "The Butcher", a poem from this collection, in his 1973 anthology The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. The poem also attracted the attention of the poet, editor and literary critic Ian Hamilton, who became Williams's mentor and "perfect reader". Williams's poems appeared in The Review and The New Review, literary magazines edited by Hamilton in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1969 The Review published a pamphlet of Williams's poems as part of a series exemplifying the magazine's "taste for spare, emotionally intense, tip-of-the-iceberg, occasionally gnomic poems". His second book of poems, Sugar Daddy, appeared in 1970. In 1971 Williams received a Cholmondeley Award, which is given annually by the Society of Authors to "recognise the achievement and distinction of individual poets" chosen "for their general body of work and contribution to poetry". In 1980, for his fourth poetry book, Love-Life, Williams shared the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize with George Szirtes. The Faber prize is awarded to "that volume of verse or prose fiction first published originally in this country during the two years preceding the