Frieda Rebecca Hughes (born 1 April 1960, London) is an English poet and painter. She has published seven children's books and four poetry collections and had many exhibitions.

Hughes was almost three years old when her mother committed suicide.

Nicholas Farrar Hughes was born in 1962, the same year that Ted Hughes left Sylvia Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. After her son was born, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous collection of poems Ariel and published her semi-autobiographical novel about mental illness The Bell Jar.

Plath addressed one of her last poems, "Nick and the Candlestick" to her son:

O love, how did you get here?
O embryo..
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.
　
In the Poem "Life After Death" Hughes recounts how:

Your son's eyes.... would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.

Death

On March 16, 2009, Nicholas hanged himself in his home in Alaska at the age 47. According to his sister Frieda Hughes, Nicholas had been depressed for quite some time. His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence for the next project or plan.