Born in Glasgow in 1955, Carol Ann Duffy was brought up in Staffordshire and studied philosophy at the University of Liverpool, where she was active in the city’s underground poetry scene in the 1970s. Her first full-length collection Standing Female Nude in 1985 was a landmark, forging an anti-establishment voice with colloquial lyricism. Duffy reached a wider audience with The World’s Wife (1999), a series of witty dramatic monologues spoken by women from fairy tales and myths, and the women usually air-brushed from history, such as Mrs Midas and Mrs Darwin. Her output has also included a large body of writing for children.

Her former relationship with the poet Jackie Kay has informed some of her best-known work. Her adult collection, Rapture, a first person account of a love affair, won the TS Eliot Prize in 2005. Duffy’s poem ‘Education for Leisure’, about a violent teenager, was controversially removed from an examination board’s GCSE syllabus in 2008, though remained on other boards. In a move typical of the poet, Duffy responded with a sardonic new poem about knives in Shakespeare (Mrs Schofield’s GCSE). It is also worth noting that violent Victorian dramatic monologues such as Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ are studied in schools.

Carol Ann Duffy was UK Poet Laureate, a post she held until 2019. Even though she never views herself as a feminist poet, her poems, especially in her collection The World’s Wife, are closely related to different feminist issues.