Carol Ann Duffy (born December 23, 1955) is a British poet, playwright and freelance writer born in Glasgow, Scotland. She grew up in Staffordshire and graduated in philosophy from Liverpool University in 1977. Carol Ann Duffy was awarded an OBE in 1995, and a CBE in 2002. She now lives in Manchester with her daughter Ella (born 1995) whose father is the writer Peter Benson. She used to live with her partner, the poet Jackie Kay, but they separated in late 2004. Carol Ann Duffy was born to Frank Duffy and May Black in Glasgow as the eldest child of the family, and has four brothers. She moved to Staffordshire at the age of four. Her father worked as a fitter for English Electric, stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour party and managed Stafford football club in his spare time. Raised Catholic, she was educated at Saint Austin Roman Catholic Primary School, St. Joseph's Convent School and Stafford Girls' High School. She was a passionate reader from an early age, and she always wanted to be a writer. Duffy dispensed with religion aged fifteen, when her convent school became an old people's home. However, she says,"Poetry and prayer are very similar...I write quite a lot of sonnets and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite." At age sixteen, she embarked on a relationship with the thirty-nine year old poet Adrian Henri, and the poem Little Red Cap in her collection The World's Wife is commonly thought to be about their relationship. She chose to study Philosophy at Liverpool University to be near him. Duffy says of Henri, "He gave me confidence, he was great. It was all poetry and sex, very heady, and he was never faithful. He thought poets had a duty to be unfaithful. I’ve never got the hang of that!" She first worked as a game-show and joke writer for Granada Television. From 1982 to 1984, she held a C. Day-Lewis Fellowship, working in east London schools, before becoming a full-time writer and dramatist in 1985.
you
Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, ...[read poem]
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so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, ...
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