Carol Ann Duffy

Career

When Duffy was 15, June Scriven sent her poems to Outposts, a publisher of pamphlets, where it was read by the bookseller Bernard Stone, who published some of them. When she was 16, she met Adrian Henri, 39 at the time, one of the Liverpool poets, and decided she wanted to be with him; she then lived with him for 10 years until they split in 1982. "He gave me confidence," she said, "he was great. It was all poetry, very heady, and he was never faithful. He thought poets had a duty to be unfaithful."

She applied to the University of Liverpool to be near him, and began a philosophy degree there in 1974. She had two plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse, wrote a pamphlet, Fifth Last Song, and received an honours degree in philosophy in 1977. She won the National Poetry Competition in 1983. She worked as poetry critic for The Guardian from 1988 to 1989, and was editor of the poetry magazine, Ambit. In 1996, she was appointed as a lecturer in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and later became creative director of its Writing School.

Duffy was a contender for the post of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1999 after the death of Ted Hughes, but lost out to Andrew Motion. Duffy said she would not have accepted the position at that time anyway, because she was in a relationship with Scottish poet Jackie Kay, had a young daughter, and would not have welcomed the public attention. In the same year, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

She was appointed as Poet Laureate on 1 May 2009, when Motion's 10-year term was over. Duffy was featured on The South Bank Show with Melvyn Bragg in December 2009 and on 7 December she presented the Turner Prize to artist Richard Wright.

Duffy received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 2009.

In 2015, Duffy was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy.

Poet laureate

In her first poem as poet laureate, Duffy tackled the scandal over British MPs' expenses in the format of a sonnet. Her second, "Last Post", was commissioned by the BBC to mark the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, the last remaining British soldiers to fight in World War I. Her third, "The Twelve Days of Christmas 2009", addresses current events such as species extinction, the climate change conference in Copenhagen, the banking crisis, and the war in Afghanistan. In March 2010, she wrote "Achilles (for David Beckham)" about the Achilles tendon injury that left David Beckham out of the English football team at the 2010 FIFA World Cup; the poem was published in The Daily Mirror and treats modern celebrity culture as a kind of mythicisation. "Silver Lining," written in April 2010, acknowledges the grounding of flights caused by the ash of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. On 30 August 2010 she premièred her poem "Vigil" for the Manchester Pride Candlelight Vigil in memory of LGBTQ people who have lost their lives to HIV/AIDS.

Duffy wrote a 46-line poem, "Rings," for the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. The poem celebrates the rings found in nature and does not specifically mention the couple's names. It begins for both to say and continues: "I might have raised your hand to the sky / to give you the ring surrounding the moon / or looked to twin the rings of your eyes / with mine / or added a ring to the rings of a tree / by forming a handheld circle with you, thee, / ...". She wrote the verse with Stephen Raw, a textual artist, and a signed print of the work was sent to the couple as a wedding gift. Duffy also wrote the poem "The Throne," which she composed for the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.

In Stylist magazine, Duffy said of becoming poet laureate: "There's no requirement. I do get asked to do things and so far I've been happy to do them." She also spoke about being appointed to the role by Queen Elizabeth II, saying: "She's lovely! I met her before I became poet laureate but when I was appointed I had an 'audience' with her which meant we were alone, at the palace, for the first time. We chatted about poetry. Her mother was friends with Ted Hughes whose poetry I admire a lot. We spoke about his influence on me."

In her appointment, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the time, Gordon Brown, congratulated her as the first woman to hold the title. Calling her a "truly brilliant modern poet". Brown also referred to Duffy as "one of the most distinguished writers in the English language".

Duffy stood down as laureate in May 2019.

Poetry

Style

Duffy's work explores both everyday experience and the rich fantasy life of herself and others. In dramatizing scenes from childhood, adolescence, and adult life, she discovers moments of consolation through love, memory, and language. Charlotte Mendelson writes in The Observer:

Part of Duffy's talent – besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety – is her ventriloquism. Like the best of her novelist peers ... she slides in and out of her characters' lives on a stream of possessions, aspirations, idioms and turns of phrase. However, she is also a time-traveller and a shape-shifter, gliding from Troy to Hollywood, galaxies to intestines, sloughed-off skin to department stores while other poets make heavy weather of one kiss, one kick, one letter ... from verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets – that is, she makes it look easy.

Of her own writing, 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." She told The Observer: "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."

Duffy rose to greater prominence in UK poetry circles after her poem "Whoever She Was" won the Poetry Society National Poetry Competition in 1983. In her first collection, Standing Female Nude (1985), she uses the voices of outsiders, for example in the poems "Education for Leisure" and "Dear Norman." 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 2005 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 Prize. In 2007, she published The Hat, a collection of poems for children. Online copies of her poems are rare, but her poem dedicated to U A Fanthorpe, "Premonitions," is available through The Guardian, and several others via The Daily Mirror.

In schools

Duffy's poems are studied in British schools at ISC, GCSE, National 5, A-level, and higher levels. In August 2008, her "Education for Leisure," a poem about violence, was removed from the GCSE AQA Anthology, following a complaint about its references to knife crime and a goldfish being flushed down a toilet. The poem begins: "Today I am going to kill something. Anything./I have had enough of being ignored and today/I am going to play God." The protagonist kills a fly, then a goldfish. The budgie panics and the cat hides. It ends with him, or her, or them, leaving the house with a knife. "The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm."

According to The Guardian, schools were urged to destroy copies of the unedited anthology, though this was later denied by AQA. Duffy called the decision ridiculous. "It's an anti-violence poem," she said. "It is a plea for education rather than violence." She responded with "Mrs Schofield's GCSE", a poem about violence in other fiction, and the point of it. "Explain how poetry/pursues the human like the smitten moon/above the weeping, laughing earth ..." The Mrs. Schofield of the title refers to Pat Schofield, an external examiner at Lutterworth College, Leicestershire, who complained about "Education for Leisure," calling it "absolutely horrendous."

For the new National Qualifications Higher English Course in Scotland, Duffy's agents, RCW Literacy Agency, refused permission for her poem, "Originally," to be reproduced in the publicly accessible version of the paper.

Anthologise annual competition for schools

In 2011 Duffy, spearheaded a new poetry competition for schools, named Anthologise. The competition is administered by the Poetry Book Society and was launched by the Duchess of Cornwall in September 2011. School students aged 11–18 from around the UK were invited to create and submit their own anthologies of published poetry. The 2011 Anthologise judges were Duffy; Gillian Clarke (National Poet for Wales); John Agard; Grace Nichols and Cambridge Professor of Children's Poetry, Morag Styles. The first ever winners of Anthologise were the sixth form pupils of Monkton Combe School, Bath, with their anthology titled The Poetry of Earth is Never Dead, which was described by Duffy as "assured and accomplished as any anthology currently on the bookshelves."

Plays and songs

Duffy is also a 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), Casanova (2007). Her radio credits include an adaptation of Rapture. Her children's collections include Meeting Midnight (1999) and The Oldest Girl in the World (2000). She also collaborated with the Manchester composer, Sasha Johnson Manning, on The Manchester Carols, a series of Christmas songs that premiered in Manchester Cathedral in 2007.

She also participated in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books, for which she wrote a piece based on a book of the King James Bible.

A modernised adaptation of Everyman by Duffy, with Chiwetel Ejiofor in the title role, was performed at the Royal National Theatre from April to July 2015.

Personal life

At the age of 16, Duffy began a relationship with poet Adrian Henri, living with him until 1982. Duffy later met poet Jackie Kay, with whom she had a 15-year relationship. During her relationship with Kay, Duffy gave birth to a daughter, Ella (born 1995), whose biological father is fellow poet Peter Benson.

Raised in her parents' Roman Catholic faith, Duffy dispensed from religion when she was 15. However, she has spoken of the influence her religious upbringing has had on the language she uses in her poetry, stating: "Poetry and prayer are very similar."

She is a lesbian. Duffy has also expressed her discomfort of being defined by her sexuality, especially when people use it to reduce her; "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?"

Honours and awards

Duffy holds honorary doctorates from the University of Dundee, the University of Hull, the University of St Andrews, and the University of Warwick, as well as an Honorary Fellowship at Homerton College, Cambridge.

• 1983: National Poetry Competition 1st prize (for Whoever She Was)
• 1983: Greenwich Poetry Competition ("for Words of Absolution")
• 1984: Eric Gregory Award
• 1986: Scottish Arts Council Book Award (for Standing Female Nude)
• 1988: Somerset Maugham Award (for Selling Manhattan)
• 1989: Dylan Thomas Prize
• 1990: Scottish Arts Council Book Award (for The Other Country
• 1992: Cholmondeley Award
• 1993: Whitbread Awards (for Mean Time)
• 1993: Scottish Arts Council Book Award (for Mean Time)
• 1993: Forward Prize (for Mean Time)
• 1995: Lannan Literary Award
• 1999: Signal Children's Poetry Prize
• 1999: Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 2001: National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts Award
• 2005: T. S. Eliot Prize (for Rapture)
• 2011: Costa Book Awards (Poetry), winner, The Bees
• 2012: PEN Pinter Prize
• 2013: Assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.
• 2015: Elected as an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy.
• 2015: Elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
• 2021: Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath Laureate

She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1995, Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002, and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to poetry.