This outstanding first collection introduced Carol Ann Duffy's impressive gifts and the broad range of her interests and style. The poems are fresh, skillful, passionate. Since its publication in 1985, Duffy has won every major poetry prize in the United Kingdom and sold over one million copies of her books around the world. Carol Ann Duffy 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, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in the U.S. She was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 2009. In 2011 The Bees won the Costa Poetry Award, and in 2012 she won the PEN Pinter Prize. She was appointed DBE in 2015.