Bettany Hughes

Hughes was born and brought up in west London.[2] She is the daughter of actor Peter Hughes and the sister of cricketer and journalist Simon Hughes. Hughes is married to Adrian Evans; the couple have two children.[3]

Hughes was educated at Notting Hill and Ealing High School in Ealing, and at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she graduated with a degree in ancient and modern history.[4]

She is a visiting research fellow at King's College London, a tutor for Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education,[5] an honorary fellow at Cardiff University, and the holder of an honorary doctorate from the University of York.[6]

Bettany Hughes speaking with Ralph Jackson (Curator of Romano-British Collections at the British Museum) during filming of Britain's Secret Treasures at the British Museum

Hughes has written and presented many documentary films and series on both ancient and modern subjects. In 2009, she was awarded the Naomi Sargant Special Award for excellence in educational broadcasting,[7] and in 2012 she was awarded the Norton Medlicott Award for services to history by the Historical Association, of which she is an honorary fellow.[8]

In 2010 she gave the Hellenic Institute's Tenth Annual lecture "Ta Erotika: The Things of Love",[9] and in 2011 gave the Royal Television Society's Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture, in which she argued that history on television is thriving and enjoying a new golden age.[10] In 2011 she chaired the Orange Prize for Fiction,[11] the UK's only annual book award for fiction written by women.[12]

Hughes is a patron of The Iris Project, a charity that promotes the teaching Latin and Greek in UK state schools.[13] She is an honorary patron of Classics For All, a national campaign to get classical languages and the study of ancient civilisations back into state schools.[14] She is an advisor to the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation which aims to foster large-scale collaborative projects between East and West.[15]

In 2014, she was made a Distinguished Friend of the University of Oxford.[16] In 2016, Hughes delivered the British Humanist Association's annual Voltaire Lecture.[17] She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to history.[18]

Hughes has written four books:

• Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore (2005)[19]
• The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life (2010)[20]
• Istanbul : a tale of three cities (2017)[21]
• Venus and Aphrodite (2019)[22]

The Hemlock Cup made the The New York Times Bestseller List, was chosen as Book of the Year by The Daily Telegraph,[23] was featured as a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4,[24] and was shortlisted for a Writer's Guild Award.[25]

Instanbul was reviewed by The New York Review of Books.[26]

• "Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore" – European Cultural Centre of Delphi, XIII International Meeting On Ancient Drama 2007, The Women in Ancient Drama, Symposium Proceedings
• "'Terrible, Excruciating, Wrong-Headed And Ineffectual': The Perils and Pleasures of Presenting Antiquity to a Television Audience" – Dunstan Lowe, Kim Shahabudin (ed.), Classics for All: Reworking Antiquity in Mass Culture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-1443801201

• Bettany Hughes Official Web site