The World's Wife

Who? Him. The Husband. Hero. Hunk.The Boy Next Door. The Paramour. The Je t'adore.Behind every famous man is a great woman - and from the quick-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.Original, subversive, full of imagination and quicksilver wit, The World's Wife is Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at her beguiling best.

Short-listed for T. S. Eliot Prize 2000 (UK) Short-listed for Forward Prize for Poetry Best Collection 1999 (UK)

Poignant, thoughtful, funny, rich and accessible -- Ruth Padel, Books of the Year Guardian
These thirty poems vibrate with intense colloquialisms, physicality, energy, freshness and cheek. Many of them are very funny... the best are inventive, subversive and written with great rhythmical and rhyming dash Sunday Telegraph
Carol Ann Duffy is a poet of skill, talent and great heart -- Erica Wagner
The World's Wife is 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
It sparkes with wit, intelligence and an impressive lightness of touch, while drawing on some weighty emotional experiences: loneliness, jealousy, self-loathing, desire, the fierceness of a mother's love -- Christina Patterson Independent
She reveals the foibles of the great, the ghastly and the ordinary bloke and the sufferings of those closest to them. The result is a melange of history lesson, fairy-tale and modern-day domestic tragedy, with the occasional joke thrown in for good measure. . . Duffy's poetics are flawless - she never misses a beat, her pace is exhilarating, and her language is original and exciting Scotsman
This book is going to be a hit, and can only consolidate Duffy's position as one of the most widely read British poets of her generation -- Robert Crawford Herald

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E.M. Forster Prize in America. She was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom for a decade from 2009 to 2019. Her many collections include Mean Time, Love Poems and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake and The Tear Thief. She was made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list. In 2021, she was awarded the international lifetime achievement award the Golden Wreath for her achievements in poetry.

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