British writer whose novel A High Wind in Jamaica (1929; filmed 1965; original title The Innocent Voyage) is a minor classic of 20th-century English literature.

Hughes was educated at Charterhouse School, near Godalming, Surrey, and at Oriel College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1922, the same year in which his one-act play The Sister's Tragedy was produced in London. In 1924 his radio play Danger, believed to be the first radio play, was broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Gipsy-Night, and Other Poems (1922) was followed four years later by a collection of verses, Confessio Juvenis, and short stories, A Moment of Time. He travelled widely in the United States and the Caribbean, contributed to literary journals, and in the early 1930s was vice chairman of the Welsh National Theatre. After A High Wind in Jamaica came In Hazard, an allegorical novel of the sea (1938). During World War II he worked for the Admiralty. His Fox in the Attic (1961) was the first part of a projected trilogy, The Human Predicament, dealing with upper-class English and Germans between World Wars I and II; the second volume, The Wooden Shepherdess, was published in 1973, but the third volume was left incomplete at his death. His books for children include The Spider's Palace (1931) and Gertrude's Child (1966).