Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She grew up in Stafford and then attended the University of Liverpool. She was awarded both the Forward and the Whitbread Prize for Mean Time (1993). Her Selected Poems are published by Penguin and her poems for children by Faber, who have recently published Meeting Midnight. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She currently lives in Manchester where she lectures in poetry for The Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.