Carol Ann Duffy
Notes On The Author
Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1955 to Mary and Frank Duffy, who were both of Irish origins. Carol Ann Duffy was the eldest child and only girl in a Roman Catholic family, and was sent to several Catholic girls schools when the family moved to Stafford, England. However, Carol Ann Duffy rejected Catholicism, and religion in general, which is apparent in her work. Moreover, Carol Ann Duffy grew up in a working-class community; her father was a shop steward and a Labour councillor. This working-class identity can also be seen in her work.
Duffy seemed to have had a strong writing identity from an early age, showing promise at primary school where she was encouraged to write by teachers. This extended into high school. Her first publication of poems was published by Outposts Poetry Magazine when she was only 18, titled Fleshweathercock and Other Poems. She met the older poet and artist Adrian Henri, one of the "Liverpool Poets", who became her mentor and with whom she lived for several years.
After high school, Duffy studied philosophy at Liverpool University (1974-77) and then worked fro Granada Television in London a few years after she graduated (1980). In London, she worked as a writer and began a long-standing association with the influential poetry magazine Ambit as an editor. Between 1988 and 1989, she was The Guardian newspaper's poetry critic.
Duffy has written plays as well as poetry: Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) and a radio play titled Loss (1986). Her plays have been performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre, and she adapted a collection of Grimm Tales, also to be performed in the later 90s. In 1996, Duffy moved from London to settle in Manchester where she lectures at the Writing School.
Apart from The World's Wife, published in 1999, Duffy's other major adult collections of poetry include Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990), Mean Time (1993), Feminine Gospels (2002), and Rapture (2005).
Duffy has also won multiple awards, including the Poet Laureate in 2009. Her first major award was the C. Day Lewis Fellowship in 1982. She also received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1988 for Selling Manhattan, and the Dylan Thomas Award in 1989. Other prestigious awards include the Scottish Arts Council Book Award for Standing Female Nude, and for The Other Country in 1990, and again in 1993 for Mean Time. This last volume also won the Forward Poetry Prize, Best Poetry Collection of the Year, and the Whitbread Poetry Award in 1993. A Lannan Literary Award in 1995 granted her a teaching post at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, America, in the same year she was awarded the OBE.
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