Carol Ann Duffy

Poet Laureate of Great Britain

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  • An Evening with Carol Ann Duffy

Biography

“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

“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 ten-year position—as well as being the first laureate to be chosen in the twenty-first Century. Duffy is one of Britain’s best-known and most celebrated poets. In 2015, Duffy was made a dame in the New Year Honours list. A bestselling author of many collections, Duffy’s 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. Her most recent book, The Bees, was awarded Britain’s prestigious Costa Award for Poetry. The Bees and Rapture were released in the US in 2013, by FSG.

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 they 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, shortlisted for the prestigious 2008 Greenway; and The Hat, 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 former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, declares, “Duffy is a very appealing, ingenious, approachable, and heartwarming writer. She’s a Good Thing, capital G, capital T.”

Short Bio

Carol Ann Duffy is the first female Poet Laureate of Great Britain and one of Britain’s best-known and most celebrated poets. She won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection of linked love poems, Rapture, and her 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. Her most recent book, The Bees, was awarded Britain’s prestigious Costa Award for Poetry. The Bees and Rapture were released in the US in 2013. Also a playwright, Duffy’s plays include Take My Husband, Cavern of Dreams, Little Women, Big Boys, Loss, and Casanova, and they have been performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London.

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