Carol Ann Duffy

Poet Laureate of Great Britain

"In the world of British poetry, Carol Ann Duffy is a superstar."
—The Guardian

"[A] truly brilliant modern poet who has stretched our imaginations by putting the whole range of human experiences into lines that capture the emotions perfectly." 
—Prime Minister Gordon Brown

“Duffy's poems are at once accessible and brilliantly idiosyncratic and subtle.” —The Observer

“Four hundred years of male domination came to an end with the election of Carol Ann Duffy as the first woman Poet Laureate of Great Britain,” declared the Guardian, as Duffy became the twentieth poet to hold the post. She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly bisexual person to hold the 10-year position—as well as being the first laureate to be chosen in the 21st Century. Duffy is one of Britain's best-known and most celebrated poets. A bestselling author of many collections, The World's Wife was the first book to gain her mass appeal: each poem was told in the voice of a wife of a great historical figure, from Mrs. Aesop to Queen Herod to Mrs. Darwin. In Feminine Gospels, she draws on women's experience—personal and historical—to entertain and challenge, elegize, and eroticize the female condition. She won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection of linked love poems, Rapture, a series of intimate poems charting the course of a love affair. Other collections include Standing Female Nude, winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; and Mean Time, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award.

Duffy’s poetry addresses essential issues such as oppression, gender, and violence—and explores both everyday experience and the rich fantasy life of herself and others—using, as the New York Times describes it, “a deceptively simple style to produce accessible, often mischievous poems dealing with the darkest turmoil and the lightest minutiae of everyday life.” Journalist Katharine Viner notes that while Duffy is praised for “her touching, sensitive, witty evocations of love, loss, dislocation, nostalgia; fans talk of greeting her at readings 'with claps and cheers that would not sound out of place at a pop concert.'"

A playwright, Duffy’s plays include Take My Husband, Cavern of Dreams, Little Women, Big Boys, Loss, and Casanova, and have been performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her radio credits include an adaptation of Rapture.

Carol Ann Duffy's writing for younger readers has always bubbled with wit and humor, intelligence and affection, and introduced us to many strange and wonderful characters along the way. Her children's collections include Meeting Midnight; The Oldest Girl in the World; The Tear Thief, a warm and poignant story set in a magical world where the tears of children arising from every emotion are of a different color; Lost Happy Endings, a wonderfully lyrical story about the search for the happy endings that are needed to make the perfect story, was shortlisted for the prestigious 2008 Greenway; and The Hat (2007) which follows the mischievous and educational journey of a hat blown through history, from one literary head to another, quoting its owner's most famous lines as it goes.

The outgoing Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, declares, “Duffy is a very appealing, ingenious, approachable, and heartwarming writer. She's a Good Thing, capital G, capital T.”

About FEMININE GOSPELS (2002)
In Feminine Gospels, Duffy draws on women's experience —both personal and historical—in poems which celebrate, elegise and eroticise the female condition. With themes of beauty, identity and the body, the book tells tall stories as though they were the gospel truth, and presents new myths as strange and powerful as the old. Feminine Gospels is a brilliant successor to Duffy's best-selling collection The World's Wife.

About THE WORLD’S WIFE (1999)
“In Duffy’s most popular collection, The World’s Wife, overlooked women in history and mythology get the chance to tell their side of the story, so that one poem imagines, for instance, the relief that Mrs. Rip Van Winkle must have felt when her husband fell asleep, finally giving her some time for herself….The World’s Wife is full of the rage of women disappointed, discarded or overlooked by men, like the wife of Quasimodo, who falls in love with him despite his deformities, only to have him turn savagely against her for her own physical failings.” —New York Times