US IB English-World's Wife: Honors & Awards

She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1995, Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002, and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to poetry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Ann_Duffy

Manchester Metropolitan University
Poet Laureate’s Dinner: A celebration of the power of poetry
Wednesday, 10th April 2019

https://www.mmu.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/story/10127/

The University has held a special event to mark the Poet Laureateship of Professor Dame Carol Ann Duffy and highlight the success of the world-renowned Manchester Writing School.

The Poet Laureate’s Dinner saw an invited audience, including Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and China’s Consul General Mr Zheng Xiyuan, hear about the public engagement work that Carol Ann instigated with her Writing School colleagues, such as the Manchester Children’s Book Festival and the Mother Tongue Other Tongue poetry competition, plus the future plans for a Poetry Library within the new Arts and Humanities building.

The event heard poetry readings from alumni Mark Pajak and Keith Hutson, plus Carol Ann’s daughter Ella, who is following in her mother’s footsteps and forging a career as a poet. There was also a reading of a special poem written for Carol Ann by PhD student Zaffar Kunial.

Carol Ann has been Poet Laureate since 2009, the first woman to hold the post in the near 350-year period of the laureateship. Her ten-year period in the post ends this month.   

Mayor Burnham, who recommended Carol Ann for the laureateship when he was Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, praised her work saying she was “a voice for the people, a voice for compassion, a voice for humanity in these very, very divided times in which we live. A voice that has sought to bring people together.”

But in addition to being Poet Laureate, Carol Ann has also been the Creative Director of our Writing School since 2006. During that period her primary objectives have been about nurturing new talent and introducing children to the joy of books and reading, working with schools, arts-based organisations and local communities.

The Writing School has a dual strategy for social engagement: it aims to widen access to poetry across languages, cultures and media and to enable new writing in contexts from schools to professional publishing. This strategy has driven long-term engagement through poetry with communities whose creativity, literature and languages are less visible and valued in mainstream arts and culture.

It informed Manchester’s successful 2017 bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature, which was made in partnership by Manchester Metropolitan, the University of Manchester and Manchester City Council, helping to define Manchester’s aspiration to be a City of Literature for all of its diverse communities, as one of the most multicultural cities on earth.

Cultural heart

Vice-Chancellor Professor Malcolm Press said: “This was a celebration of the contribution Carol Ann has made to our University. Carol Ann has led some fantastic projects over the course of her Poet Laureateship and she is also an integral part of our Writing School.

“I think if anything defines our Writing School it’s the success of the staff and the students who comprise it. The poetry we produce is second-to-none. Our poets have won every major poetry prize in existence and we can really lay claim to a very proud heritage.

“We have more than 90 Writing School alumni who have gone on to publishing careers and that is a remarkable achievement. Many of those people are significant literature prize winners.

“The Writing School has played a major role in placing the University at the heart of Manchester culture and we are enormously proud of the work we do with our partners around the city.”

A film was produced for the evening to highlight the work of The Writing School and you can view that here:

Duffy holds honorary doctorates from the University of Dundee, the University of Hull, the University of St Andrews, and the University of Warwick, as well as an Honorary Fellowship at Homerton College, Cambridge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Ann_Duffy

It is rare that a woman is kept out of a low-paying job for long. But for 340 years, the £5,750-a-year role of Britain’s poet laureate has been a male-only preserve.

Until this week, that is, when Carol Ann Duffy was appointed Britain’s first laureate for the 21st century. The 53-year-old also breaks some other records. She is the first Scot to do the job, though she moved to the Midlands aged five. She is also the first openly gay laureate.

This last attribute became the subject of Whitehall gossip when Ms Duffy was mooted in 1998 as a successor to Ted Hughes. Many believe she was vetoed because she was a single mother in a lesbian relationship – her daughter Ella is now 13.

Instead, Andrew Motion was nominated. But the role changed. Once a lifetime honour, in 1999 the job became a 10-year fixed term. That means the chattering classes have had a decade to speculate about Mr Motion’s successor. Burnt by the media attention in 1999, Ms Duffy declared herself “out of the picture” for the future. “I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie,” she said, referring to Prince Edward’s then forthcoming marriage. “No self-respecting poet should have to.”

Later, she conceded that the role of laureate was a “nice” thing for a nation, “in the way that it’s nice to have a football manager or a mayor”. Buckingham Palace prefers to call it a “special honour” bestowed on a poet of national significance.

When the British get over the novelty of having a female laureate, however, they will discover more interesting reasons to welcome Ms Duffy’s appointment. She is one of Britain’s most widely read living poets. In one sense she is already institutionalised – her work has been on the national curriculum for 15 years.

“She is a people’s poet, not just a poet’s poet,” said Judith Palmer, director of The Poetry Society. Ms Duffy has written more than 30 collections of poetry, books for children and plays for stage and radio.

The poetry world is small, however. Another leading candidate for the laureateship was Simon Armitage, a tutor at Manchester Metropolitan University where Ms Duffy is professor and director of creative writing; Ms Duffy’s former partner Jackie Kay was also a contender. She had a 10-year relationship with another poet, Adrian Henri.

The gossips may focus on these personal details, but Ms Duffy has fought for her poetry. Mr Motion was a conciliator, but Ms Duffy may have a fiery decade as laureate. Last year an exam board dropped one of her poems from the syllabus, claiming that Education for Leisure glorified knife crime: “Today I am going to kill something. Anything./ I have had enough of being ignored”. She responded with a new poem that highlighted stabbings in Shakespeare’s plays.

Ms Duffy wears her politics openly, too. Before Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative party leader, came to power in 1979 Ms Duffy wrote more personal poetry: “Then, for a while, the world around me sort of forced me to be more political.”

Though there is no royal command to do anything in the job, there is a custom and weight of expectation that the British laureate marks public – particularly royal – events. In the US, Kay Ryan, the current laureate, said she would consider any commission for national events “doomed to fail”. She added: “Poetry does not arise from obligation – it’s free of duty to anything except possibly the constraints of language and grammar.”

In former centuries Britain’s laureate composed an ode to the monarch on special occasions such as their birthday. Mr Motion even wrote a rap in 2003 for Prince William’s 21st: “Better stand back/ Here’s an age attack,/ But the second in line/ Is dealing with it fine.”

Ms Duffy has already accepted tributes from the Queen in the form of an OBE in 1995 and a CBE in 2001. But Ms Palmer describes Ms Duffy as a “maverick”, adding: “Is she going to write fantastic poems about corgis? She’s quite irreverent – she might cause a stir at the palace.”

Ms Duffy did, in fact, write a poem after Princess Diana died in 1997, inspired by the outpouring of grief: “Someone vividly gifted in love has gone”, ran the piece, which continued with the more controversial line: “England’s crown is rusting.” Will Ms Duffy, now an appointee of Queen Elizabeth II herself, confront her royal employer?

Rather than the pomp and glory of monarchy, Ms Duffy’s subjects have been inequality, alienation and oppression. She also writes unsentimentally on love; Rapture (2005), which won the TS Eliot prize, charted an affair with an unnamed female lover. Much of her work explores gender and the female perspective. The World’s Wife sold 64,000 copies – a best-seller by poetry standards – where great wives recount history: “Frau Freud”, “Queen Herod” and “Mrs Darwin”. Only rarely have Ms Duffy’s poems addressed particular moments in national life: Loud (2002), for example, sees a woman howl with rage when she hears about the war in Afghanistan; her cry is heard around the world. Her writing is often humorous or wry, always accessible: “This was the code I learnt at my mother’s knee, pretending/ to read, where no one had cancer, or sex, or debts”. Poetry, even the best poetry, should be accessible “to where I came from”, she has said.

Those roots are in rank and file Britain. Born in Glasgow in 1955, Ms Duffy was brought up in the Midlands and educated at a convent then a grammar school. Her father worked for English Electric, managed the local football team and once stood as a Labour parliamentary candidate. Her mother left school at 14 and died from cancer in 2005. She cites as her influences from childhood Alice in Wonderland, Grimm’s fairy tales and Richmal Crompton’s Just William books.

Though she fell in love with poetry at school, she thought it was something associated with dead people. She studied philosophy at university in Liverpool (she still supports the football team) and one day spotted Ted Hughes at a party: “It might have been Shakespeare dancing there in front of me,” she said.

This week, she was “honoured and humbled” to accept the post. She is already making the job her own, with plans to donate her salary to set up a new poetry prize. That Ms Duffy is the first female laureate adds “a sense of rightness” to the role, the outgoing laureate Mr Motion said. “It pushes open a door that has been kept closed, or at least hasn’t been pushed open, for 300 years.”

Financial Times, 2009 https://www.ft.com/content/89f0c588-367b-11de-af40-00144feabdc0