Carol Ann Duffy is the first female Poet Laureate of Great Britain and one of Britain’s best-known and most celebrated poets. She won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection of linked love poems, Rapture,and her other collections include Standing Female Nude, winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award, Selling Manhattan, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, and Mean Time, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award. Her most recent book, The Bees, was awarded Britain’s prestigious Costa Award for Poetry. The Bees and Rapture were released in the US in 2013. Also a playwright, Duffy’s plays include Take My Husband, Cavern of Dreams, Little Women, Big Boys, Loss, and Casanova, and they have been performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London.