2. • Carol Ann Duffy (born December 23, 1955) is
a British poet, playwright and freelance writer
born in Glasgow, Scotland.
• She was born in Glasgow in 1955 to a Scottish
father and an Irish mother. Raised Catholic, she
grew up in Staffordshire an ardent reader and
elder sister to four brothers. Her mother would
invent fairy tales for her - a form whose
archetypes she has always found seductive. She
has been particularly interested in exploring
feminine archetypes, which she subverts with
dexterity in The World's Wife (Anvil Press
Poetry 1999). Duffy wanted from a very early
age to be a writer and was encouraged to write
poetry by an inspirational teacher at a Convent
school when she was ten years old.
3. Duffy dispensed with religion aged fifteen, when her convent
school became an old people's home. However, she says,
"Poetry and prayer are very similar...I write quite a lot of
sonnets and I think of them almost as prayers: short and
memorable, something you can recite. "At age sixteen, she
embarked on a relationship with the thirty-nine year old poet
Adrian Henri, and the poem "Little Red Cap" in her
collection "The World's Wife" is commonly thought to be
about their relationship. She chose to study Philosophy at
Liverpool University to be near him. Duffy says of Henri,
"He gave me confidence, he was great. It was all poetry and
sex, very heady, and he was never faithful. He thought poets
had a duty to be unfaithful. I’ve never got the hang of that!"
She first worked as a game-show and joke writer for Granada
Television. From 1982 to 1984, she held a C. Day-Lewis
Fellowship, working in east London schools, before
becoming a full-time writer and dramatist in 1985.
4. Carol Ann Duffy was a poetry critic for "The Guardian"
(1988-1989), and is the former editor of the poetry
magazine "Ambit". She is currently Professor of
Contemporary Poetry and Creative Director of the Writing
School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is on
the judging panel for the Manchester Poetry Prize.
Characterized by social critique channeled through
dramatic monologue, Carol Ann Duffy's poems provide
voices for an extraordinary number of contemporary
characters, including a fairground psychopath, a literary
biographer, a newborn baby, disinherited American
Indians, and even a ventriloquist's dummy. Many of the
poems reflect on time, change, and loss. In dramatizing
scenes of childhood, adolescence, and adult life, whether
personal or public, contemporary or historical, she
discovers moments of consolation through love, memory,
and language. She explores not only everyday experience,
but also the rich fantasy life of herself and others.
5. Of her own writing, Carol Ann Duffy has
said, "I'm not interested, as a poet, in words like
'plash' - Seamus Heaney words, interesting
words. I like to use simple words but in a
complicated way. "Singer-composer Eliana
Tomkins, whom Duffy collaborated with on a
series of live jazz recitals, says "With a lot of
artists, the mystique is to baffle their readership.
She never does that. Her aim is to
communicate." In her first collection "Standing
Female Nude" (1985) she often uses the voices
of outsiders while "Selling Manhattan" (1987)
contains more personal verse. Her later
collections are "The Other Country"
(1990), "Mean Time" (1993) and "The World's
Wife" (1999).
6. "The World's Wife" saw her retelling famous stories
and fables - Midas, King Kong, Elvis, Anne
Hathaway, Salome in a collection of poems about
women, real or imagined, usually excluded from
history.
Her next collection "Feminine Gospels" (2002)
continues this vein, showing an increased interest in
long narrative poems, accessible in style and often
surreal in their imagery. Her most recent
publication, "Rapture" (2005), is a series of intimate
poems charting the course of a love affair, for which
she won the £10,000 T.S Eliot poetry prize. In 2007 she
published a poetry collection for children entitled "The
Hat".
Many British students read her work while studying for English Literature at GCSE and A-
level, as she became part of the syllabus in England and Wales in 1994.
7.
8. According to the journalist Katharine Viner,
"Her poems are accessible and entertaining, yet
her form is classical, her technique razor-sharp.
She is read by people who don't really read
poetry, yet she maintains the respect of her
peers. Reviewers praise 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'".
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)
"Loss" (1986), a radio play and
"Casanova" (2007). She has also
adapted "Rapture" as a radio play.
[Radio play "Rapture", performed by
Fiona Shaw, with Eliana Tomkins, on
BBC Radio Four on 24 July 2007.] Her
children's collections include "Meeting
Midnight" (1999) and "The Oldest Girl
in the World" (2000).
9. Carol Ann Duffy was almost
appointed the British Poet
Laureate in 1999 (after the death
of previous Laureate Ted
Hughes), but lost out on the
position to Andrew Motion.
According to the "Sunday
Times“
10. Downing Street sources stated unofficially
that Prime Minister Tony Blair was 'worried
about having a homosexual poet laureate
because of how it might play in middle
England'. Duffy later claimed that she would
not have accepted the laureateship anyway,
saying in an interview with the "Guardian"
newspaper that 'I will not write a poem for
Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet
should have to.' She says she regards
Andrew Motion as a friend and that the idea
of a contest between her and him for the post
was entirely invented by the newspapers. "I
genuinely don't think she even wanted to be
poet laureate," said Peter Jay, Duffy's former
publisher. "The post can be a poisoned
chalice. It is not a role I would wish on
anyone - particularly not someone as
forthright and uncompromising as Carol
Ann."
11.
12. In August 2008, Duffy's poem
'Education for Leisure' was
removed from the AQA
examination board's GCSE
poetry anthology. This
followed a complaint from an
external examiner relating to
references to knife crime in the
poem. According to news
reports, schools were urged to
destroy copies of the unedited
anthology,
although a statement from AQA denied this. Duffy countered the removal with a poem
highlighting violence in other fiction such as Shakespeare's plays.
13. Awards
*Eric Gregory Award 1984
*Scottish Arts Council Book Award (for "Standing Female
Nude" and "The Other Country", and again for "Mean Time")
*Somerset Maugham Award 1988 (for "Selling Manhattan")
*Dylan Thomas Award 1989
*Cholmondeley Award 1992
*Whitbread Awards 1993 (for "Mean Time")
*Forward Prize (for "Mean Time")
*T S Eliot Prize 2005 (for "Rapture")
*Forward Prize (for "Rapture")
*Greenwich Poetry Competition ("for Words of Absolution")
*Nesta Award 2001
*Lannan Award 1995
*National Poetry Competition 1st prize, 1983 (for "Whoever
She Was")
*Signal Children's Poetry Prize 1999
14. "When you have a child, your
previous life seems like
someone else's. It's like living
in a house and suddenly
finding a room you didn't
know was there, full of
treasure and light."
"My prose is turgid, it
just hasn't got any
energy."
"In the 1970s, when I
started on the circuit, I
was called a poetess.
Older male poets, the
Larkin generation, were
both incredibly
patronizing and incredibly
randy. If they weren’t
patting you on the head,
they were patting you on
the bum."
"I’m not a lesbian poet, whatever that is. If I
am a lesbian icon and a role model, that’s
great, but if it is a word that is used to reduce
me, then you have to ask why someone would
want to reduce me? I never think about it. I
don’t care about it. I define myself as a poet
and as a mother – that’s all."
"Like the sand and the
oyster, it's a creative
irritant. In each poem,
I'm trying to reveal a
truth, so it can't have a
fictional beginning."
"Childhood for
children yet to be
born will be
darkened in ways
we can't imagine."
