Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She grew up in Stafford and then attended the University of Liverpool, where she studied philosophy. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread and Forward Prizes, and the Lannan Award and the E M Forster Prize in America. In 2005, she won the T S Eliot Prize for Rapture. She became the first female Poet Laureate in 2009.