Background
Hesketh was born in Preston, Lancashire. Her father was the pioneer radiologist Arthur E. Rayner. Her mother was a violinist in the Hallé Orchestra.
Hesketh was born in Preston, Lancashire. Her father was the pioneer radiologist Arthur E. Rayner. Her mother was a violinist in the Hallé Orchestra.
She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies" College, but left at the age of 17 to care for her ill mother.
Her first collection, Poems, was published in 1939 by Sherratt & Hughes, Manchester, although she would later disown this work to some extent. During World World War II Hesketh worked as woman"s page editor of the Bolton Evening News. In 1948 she published her second volume, Lean Forward, Spring!, (London: Sidgwick and Jackson), a book that earned her widespread acclaim amongst the literary community, including from Siegfried Sassoon.
After the War she was a freelance lecturer, poetry teacher and journalist, producing many articles for journals and scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Her collected poems were gathered together in Netting the Sun: new and collected poems (, 1989).
Her poetry for younger readers was published in A Song of Sunlight (Chatto, 1974) and in Six of the Best (Puffin, 1989). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1956, and a Fellow of the University of Central Lancashire in 1990.
Foreign almost all of her life she lived in Lancashire, in a landscape frequently described in her poetry, and also in her prose books Rivington (1972) and Village of the Mountain Ash (1990). The Heskeths had three children.