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Duffy lived in Glasgow, Scotland, until age six, when she and her family moved to Stafford, England. Her father, a fitter for an electric company, ran an unsuccessful bid for Parliament in 1983. Duffy grew up attending convent schools and began publishing her poetry in magazines at age 14.(Britannica)

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(Britannica)

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She attended Liverpool University. After graduating with a degree in philosophy in 1977, Duffy set to work publishing several books and traveling to read and teach her poetry. She also worked as a poetry critic for The Guardian from 1988 to 1989 and as an editor for the poetry magazine Ambit. In 1996 she began lecturing in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she later became creative director of the Writing School.(Britannica)

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Duffy is best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues. Her verses, as an Economist reviewer described them, are typically “spoken in the voices of the urban disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world.”(Poetry Foundation)

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In 1999 British media claimed that Duffy had been considered for the position of poet laureate but that Prime Minister Tony Blair feared her homosexuality would not be well received by “middle England” (Britannica)

Her work received such notable accolades as the Scottish Arts Council Award, the Whitbread (later Costa) Book Award for poetry, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1995, advanced to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002, and was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 2015. (Britannica)

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Duffy’s poetry collections included Standing Female Nude (1985), The Other Country (1990), The World’s Wife (1999), Rapture (2005), and Sincerity (2018). During this time she also authored such plays as Take My Husband (1982) and Little Women, Big Boys (1986). At the beginning of the 21st century, much of her work was written for children, including the picture books Underwater Farmyard (2002), The Tear Thief (2007), The Princess’s Blankets (2009), and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Christmas Birthday (2014), as well as the poetry collection The Hat (2007). She continued to produce verse for adults as well, notably issuing the collections Love Poems (2010), The Bees (2011), and Sincerity (2018), and her stage credits included retellings of the story of Casanova (2007) and of the morality play Everyman (2015).(Britannica)

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Duffy’s poetry has always been strong and feminist. This position is especially well captured in her first collection, Standing Female Nude, in which the title poem consists of an interior monologue comprising a female model’s response to the male artist who is painting her image in a Cubist style. Although at first the conversation seems to indicate the model’s acceptance of conventional attitudes about beauty in art—and, by extension, what an ideal woman should be—as the poem progresses Duffy deconstructs these traditional beliefs. Ultimately, the poet expresses that “the model cannot be contained by the visual art that would regulate her,” explained DiMarco. “And here the way the poem ends with the model’s final comment on the painting ‘It does not look like me’—is especially instructive. On the one hand, her response suggests that she is naive and does not understand the nature of Cubist art. On the other hand, however, the comment suggests her own variableness, and challenges traditionalist notions that the naked model can, indeed, be transmogrified into the male artist’s representation of her in the nude form. To the model, the painting does not represent either what she understands herself to be or her lifestyle.” (Poetry Foundation)

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Her early passion for reading and writing was encouraged by two of her English teachers, and developed by the poet-artist Adrian Henri(Scottish Poetry Libary)