Carol Ann Duffy
(December 23, 1955 - living) U.K.
Poet
Born in Glasgow, her mother, Mary Black, was Irish. When Carol Ann Duffy was five her father, Frank Duffy, whose grandparents were also Irish, got a job as a fitter with English Electric (later to become GEC and then Marconi), and the family moved to Stafford. Carol Ann Duffy has four younger brothers.
From 1962 to 1967 she attended St Austin Roman Catholic Primary School, Stafford. From 1967 to 1970 she was at St Joseph's convent school, Stafford, where she was encouraged in her poetry by her teacher June Scriven. At the age of 14 she decided that she was going to be a poet. When she was 15 June Scriven typed up a collection of her poems and sent it to the publisher Outposts.
At 16, she met the poet Adrian Henri. Despite the fact that he was 23 years her senior, she began a relationship with him that took her to the University of Liverpool and a degree in philosophy. From 1970 to 1974 she was at the Stafford High School for girls where she was further encouraged by her English teacher James Walker.
Duffy attended university in Liverpool before moving to London, and then to Manchester. Carol Ann Duffy began a relationship with another poet, Jackie Kay in the early 1990s. They live together in Manchester, in the suburb of West Didsbury. Her collection of poetry entitled The World's Wife is dedicated, amongh others, to her partner Jackie Kay. Duffy was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1995. This vaulted her into the stratosphere of contemporary British poetry.
Duffy, who is considered one of the most outstanding poets of her generation, hit the news in 1999 when, in the wake of the death of the Poet Laureate Ted Hugues, a replacement was sought. For a time it looked as if she might be a serious contender for this position but her lesbianism was persistently cited in the media as the reason why she was unlikely to be offered the position as, indeed, and to the shame of the establishment, in the end she was not.
Duffy retreated into her happy home life, including daughter Ella, Kay's son Matthew and dog Dinks, and kept doing what she does best: write poetry. Her latest endeavor is a book of children's poetry, Meeting Midnight. She lives in Manchester, where she teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University, with her family.
Her work include:
- Fleshweathercock (1973)
- Standing Female Nude (1985)
- Mean Time (1993)
- Selected Poems (1994)
- The World's Wife (1999)
Excerpts from: Gabriele Griffin, Who's Who in Lesbian and Gay and Writing, Routledge, London, 2002 - and from: The Knitting Circle, U.K., http://www.sbu.ac.uk/stafflag/people.html - and alii
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