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Duffy It Is

Good news. The first woman (and Scot) to be named as the British poet laureate is Carol Ann Duffy. As one of the leading and most popular of UK poets, whose reach is both wide and deep, hers should prove an excellent decade - and her first act, of giving away the annual fee, isn't bad either (though it might have been useful for travelling around to events, and it isn't clear that Britain really does need yet another annual poetry competition....). I worked with Duffy when she donate poems to the Oxfam Life Lines poetry CD project, and she was extremely generous with her time.
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