Another Night Before Christmas

Carol Ann Duffy has published four highly praised collections of poetry. Her last, "Mean Time", won the "Forward" Poetry Prize & the Whitbread Poetry Prize. She lives in Manchester, England. (Publisher Fact Sheets) Carol Ann Duffy was born on December 23, 1955 in Gasgow. She is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is also Professor of Contemporary show more 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. She was a passionate reader from an early age, and always wanted to be a writer, producing poems from the age of 11. 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. She applied to the University of Liverpool 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 worked as poetry critic for The Guardian from 1988 -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. She has since gone on to write several works of poetry and children's books. Her title's The World's Wife, Rapture, and The Bees made the New Zealand Best Seller List. (Publisher Provided) show less