Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy (born December 23, 1955, Glasgow, Scotland) is a British poet whose well-known and well-liked poetry engaged such topics as gender and oppression, expressing them in familiar, conversational language that made her work accessible to a variety of readers. In 2009–19 she served as the first woman poet laureate of Great Britain.

Duffy lived in Glasgow, Scotland, until age six, when she and her family moved to Stafford, England. Her father, a fitter for an electric company, ran an unsuccessful bid for Parliament in 1983. Duffy grew up attending convent schools and began publishing her poetry in magazines at age 14. She later attended Liverpool University. After graduating with a degree in philosophy in 1977, Duffy set to work publishing several books and traveling to read and teach her poetry. She also worked as a poetry critic for The Guardian from 1988 to 1989 and as an editor for the poetry magazine Ambit. In 1996 she began lecturing in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she later became creative director of the Writing School.

Duffy’s poetry collections included Standing Female Nude (1985), The Other Country (1990), The World’s Wife (1999), Rapture (2005), and Sincerity (2018). During this time she also authored such plays as Take My Husband (1982) and Little Women, Big Boys (1986). At the beginning of the 21st century, much of her work was written for children, including the picture books Underwater Farmyard (2002), The Tear Thief (2007), The Princess’s Blankets (2009), and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Christmas Birthday (2014), as well as the poetry collection The Hat (2007). She continued to produce verse for adults as well, notably issuing the collections Love Poems (2010), The Bees (2011), and Sincerity (2018), and her stage credits included retellings of the story of Casanova (2007) and of the morality play Everyman (2015).

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In 1999 British media claimed that Duffy had been considered for the position of poet laureate but that Prime Minister Tony Blair feared her homosexuality would not be well received by “middle England”; the poet and author Andrew Motion was chosen instead. Upon accepting the position at the end of Motion’s term, in 2009, Duffy made it clear in interviews that she had agreed to become poet laureate only because, since its inception in the 17th century, no woman had previously held the post. She also expressed impatience with claims that her sexuality had kept her from the post; her 10-year term ended in 2019. Her work received such notable accolades as the Scottish Arts Council Award, the Whitbread (later Costa) Book Award for poetry, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1995, advanced to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002, and was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 2015.