Duffy, Carol Ann: The World's Wife (Paperback)

'A joyous, exuberant book of poems about women usually excluded from myth and history' Guardian

'Duffy takes a cheeky, subversive, no-nonsense swipe with a dish-clout at the famous men of history and myth. They don't have a chance in hell of dodging her quick-witted wallop as she relays their stories from their spouse's points of view' The Times

Carol Ann Duffy's virtuoso fifth collection, and her first themed, is undoubtedly one that brought her to a wider readership than any other contemporary poet. As the saying goes 'behind every famous man is a great woman' - and from the sharp-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection.

First published in 1999 and at once lauded as original, full of imagination and radical wit, The World's Wife is a feminist classic.

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. 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, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, the PEN Pinter Prize, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. Her collections include Ritual Lighting, Love Poems, Rapture and The Bees which won the Costa Poetry Award.