Wednesday 9 February 2011

Biographical Detail 5 - Carol Ann Duffy

Post one, interesting biographical detail about Carol Ann Duffy.

You must check that you are not repeating something that has already been posted.

Go!

14 comments:

  1. Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is also a Bisexual!Britain's first female Poet Laureate and was born on 23 December 1955 in Glasgow and read philosophy at Liverpool University. Duffy was born to a Roman Catholic family in the Gorbals, a very poor part of Glasgow, the first child of Scot Frank Duffy, an electrical fitter whose grandparents were Irish, and May Black, who was Irish herself

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  2. She was born in a very poor part of Glasgow.

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  3. Taking off from Ade's and Josh's points; she was poor in her early life, this made it possible for her to trully write from the heart as her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.

    Check it out yo... She studied in Liverpool!!!(philosophy degree at Liverpool Univerty)
    Big up scousers right? - well maybe not that far...

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  4. In her first poem as poet laureate, Duffy tackled the scandal over British MPs expenses in the format of a sonnet!

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  5. On August the 30th 2010 she premièred her poem "Vigil" for the Manchester Pride Candlelight Vigil in memory of LGBT people who have lost their lives to HIV/AIDS.

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  6. Carol Ann Duffy is queen of the dramatic monologue. Duffy's poetry gives voice to society's alienated and ignored in an unstuffy but compelling manner, wrestling with ideas about language and identity. As Duffy says herself: "I like to use simple words but in a complicated way."

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  7. Duffy was born to a Roman Catholic family in the Gorbals, a very poor part of Glasgow in Scotland.

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  8. Carol Ann Duffy had a passion for reading from an early age and an interest in poetry that other pupils at her school did not share. She had always wanted to become a writer.

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  9. Duffy's work explores both everyday experience and the rich fantasy life of herself and others. In dramatising 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. Like the best of her novelist peers ... she slides in and out of her characters' lives on a stream of possessions, aspirations, idioms and turns of phrase. 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.

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  10. Duffy was almost appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1999 after the death of Ted Hughes, but lost out on the position to Andrew Motion.

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  11. She has worked as a freelance writer in London, after which she moved to live in Manchester, where she currently (2002) teaches creative writing at the Metropolitan University.

    Of her own writing she has said:

    “I'm not interested, as a poet, in words like 'plash' - Seamus Heaney words, interesting words. I like to use simple words but in a complicated way.”

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  12. Carol Ann Duffy is a british poet whose well-known and well-liked poetry engaged such topics as gender and oppression, expressing them in familiar, conversational language that made her work accessible to a variety of readers. In 2009 she became the first woman appointed poet laureate...

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  14. In October 2000 she was awarded a grant of £75,000 over a five-year period by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

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