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Carol-Ann Duffy

Dame
Carol Ann Duffy
DBE FRSL
Carol Ann Duffy (cropped).jpg
Duffy in June 2009
Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom
Assumed office
1 May 2009
Monarch Elizabeth II
Preceded by Andrew Motion
Personal details
Born (1955-12-23) 23 December 1955 (age 61)
Glasgow, Scotland
Nationality British
Children Ella (born 1995)
Relatives Mary Black (mother) died 2005
Frank Duffy (father)
Education B.A. (Hons) Philosophy
Alma mater University of Liverpool
Occupation Poet, playwright
Awards OBE 1995
CBE 2002
DBE 2015

Dame Carol Ann Duffy DBE FRSL (born 23 December 1955) is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009. She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold the position.

Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.

Carol Ann Duffy was born to a Roman Catholic family in the Gorbals, a poor part of Glasgow. She was the first child of Frank Duffy, an electrical fitter, and Mary Black. The couple went on to have another four children, all boys. The family moved to Stafford, England, when Duffy was six years old. Her father worked for English Electric. He was a trade unionist, and stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party in 1983 in addition to managing the Stafford Rangers football club.

Duffy was educated in Stafford at Saint Austin's RC Primary School (1962–1967), St. Joseph's Convent School (1967–1970), and Stafford Girls' High School (1970–1974), her literary talent encouraged by two English teachers, June Scriven at St Joseph's, and Jim Walker at Stafford Girls' High. She was a passionate reader from an early age, and always wanted to be a writer, producing poems from the age of 11. When one of her English teachers died, she wrote:


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