This is an accepted version of this page Dame Carol Ann Duffy (born 23 December 1955) is a Scottish[3] poet and playwright.

[6] Carol Ann Duffy was born into a Roman Catholic family in the Gorbals,[7] considered a poor part of Glasgow.

When one of her English teachers died, she wrote: You sat on your desk, swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed as it fell in love with the words and I saw the tree in the scratched old desk under my hands, heard the bird in the oak outside scribble itself on the air.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts, that small familiar pain; then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

[6] 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.

[16] In her first poem as poet laureate, Duffy tackled the scandal over British MPs' expenses in the format of a sonnet.

[17] 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.

[18] 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.

[19] 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;[20] the poem was published in The Daily Mirror and treats modern celebrity culture as a kind of mythicisation.

[21] "Silver Lining," written in April 2010, acknowledges the grounding of flights caused by the ash of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[35][36] 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.

"[38] 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.

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.

[43] 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.

[44][45] During her relationship with Kay, Duffy gave birth to a daughter, Ella (born 1995), whose biological father is fellow poet Peter Benson.