Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.

She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold the position.

Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.

The effortless virtuosity, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffys verse have made her a most admired contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is a book-length love poem, and a moving act of personal testimony. But what sets these poems apart from other love poems is Duffys refusal to simplify the contradictions of love, and read its transformationsinfatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and griefas either redemptive or destructive. Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity; simultaneously direct and subtle, with poems that will find deep resonance in the experience of most readers, it is a collection that speaks for us all.