Scottish poet and playwright Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow, an eldest daughter with four younger brothers. She was raised in Stafford, where she attended Roman Catholic schools and Stafford Girls’ High. She began writing poetry at age 11 and enjoyed support from two of her English teachers. She was first published at 15; the following year, she met the poet and artist Adrian Henri, who was 23 years her senior, and moved in with him. She lived with him for a decade, during which time she earned a philosophy degree from the University of Liverpool and began publishing poetry collections and plays.
Duffy came to public attention in 1983 after winning the National Poetry Competition. Her full-length poetry works since then include Standing Female Nude, Selling Manhattan, Mean Time, The World’s Wife, Rapture, and Sincerity. She has also authored numerous selected poems, pamphlets, plays, and children’s books. She is a prolific editor of poetry anthologies, with titles such as Answering Back (Picador), Out of Fashion (Faber), and Hand in Hand: An Anthology of Love Poems (Picador). Duffy’s plays have been performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and London’s Almeida Theatre, and she collaborated with composer Sasha Johnson Manning on The Manchester Carols.
Duffy was famously a contender for the role of Poet Laureate in 1999. Her candidacy was marked by concerns that the reactionary British tabloid media would disparage her lesbianism and her relationship with then-partner and poet Jackie Kay. Although Andrew Motion was selected instead, she was chosen for the Poet Laureate post in 2009 at the completion of his term, making her the first woman, Scot, and openly LGBTQ+ person to hold the position. Her many other accolades include an Eric Gregory Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, a Cholmondeley Award, a Forward Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whitbread Award, a T. S. Eliot Prize, a Costa Book Award, a PEN Pinter Prize, a Signal Prize for Children’s Verse, and two Scottish Arts Council Book Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and she has been appointed an OBE, CBE, and DBE. In 2021, she was awarded the Golden Wreath, an international lifetime achievement award honoring her achievements in poetry.
Duffy is Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she was previously a poetry lecturer and continues to teach. She has also been editor of Ambit and worked as The Guardian’s poetry critic. Her poetry is widely assigned for the GCSE, A-levels, and other courses. Known for her approachable language, evocative persona poems from different perspectives, and focus on women’s experience, she is a household name across the UK and beyond.
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More Carol Ann Duffy
Text: Read poems by Duffy at the Scottish Poetry Library
Video: Duffy reads poetry and answers questions at the University of Lincoln
Audio/Text: Duffy is interviewed at The Lincoln Review
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Photo by Jemimah Kuhfeld.