Dame Carol-Ann Duffy

Poet, playwright and freelance writer Carol Ann Duffy read philosophy at Liverpool University.

She is a former editor of the poetry magazine Ambit and is a regular reviewer and broadcaster. She moved from London to Manchester in 1996 and began to lecture in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her papers were acquired by the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University in 1999, and in October 2000 she was awarded a grant of £75,000 over a five-year period by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Her adult poetry collections are Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); The World's Wife (1999); Feminine Gospels (2002), a celebration of the female condition; Rapture (2005), winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Bees (2011), winner of the 2011 Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Christmas Truce (2011), Wenceslas: A Christmas Poem (2012), illustrated by Stuart Kolakovic; Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday (2014) and Sincerity (2018). Her children's poems are collected in New & Collected Poems for Children (2009). In 2012, to mark the Diamond Jubilee, she compiled Jubilee Lines, 60 poems from 60 poets each covering one year of the Queen's reign. In the same year, she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize.

She also writes picture books for children, and these include Underwater Farmyard (2002); Doris the Giant (2004); Moon Zoo (2005); The Tear Thief (2007); and The Princess's Blankets (2009).

Anthologies edited by Carol Ann Duffy include Out of Fashion (2004), in which she creates a vital dialogue between classic and contemporary poets over the two arts of poetry and fashion; Answering Back (2007); and To The Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poems (2009).

Carol Ann Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) and Loss (1986), a radio play. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1984 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1992 from the Society of Authors, the Dylan Thomas Award from the Poetry Society in 1989 and a Lannan Literary Award from the Lannan Foundation (USA) in 1995. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, a CBE in 2001 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester and is Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She was Poet Laureate from 2009 until 2019, succeeding Andrew Motion.