Professor Carol Ann Duffy DBE has been awarded the Golden Wreath for 2021, a prestigious international award for lifetime achievement in the field of poetry.
The Golden Wreath, considered one of the most significant global poetry awards, is the main prize awarded during the Struga Poetry Evenings, an international cultural festival held annually in North Macedonia.
Professor Carol Ann Duffy DBE, Creative Director of the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, called the honour “an extraordinary gift for which I will be forever grateful”.
Dating back to 1961, the Struga Poetry Evenings is one of the oldest international poetry festivals, and the Golden Wreath award has been won by an extraordinary roster of renowned writers in recognition for their overall contribution to poetry. Previous Golden Wreath laureates include Margaret Atwood, W.H Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda and Ted Hughes. Professor Duffy is only the fifth woman to have won the Golden Wreath.
The festival is supported by UNESCO and the announcement was made at the UNESCO HQ in Paris on World Poetry Day.
Professor Duffy said: “In these grim, dark times for the world, I am overwhelmed to find at my door the light of a Golden Wreath. To have my name added to a list of poets who have meant so much to me throughout my reading and writing life is an extraordinary gift for which I will be forever grateful.
“Poetry is a vocation, the music of being human, which seeks only to answer the world and, in so doing, add to it with the new songs of words. This year, the expression “words fail me” has taken on a sombre meaning for me as poet, so this wonderful award from North Macedonia has lifted my spirits and made me so happy to be welcomed into this great European tradition of valuing poetry.”
The Golden Wreath will be presented to Professor Duffy during the “Bridges” poetry reading, one of the central events of the Struga Poetry Evenings festival, celebrating its 60th year from August 25-30. The festival publishes a book of poetry by the winner of the Golden Wreath in its original language and translated in Macedonian.
Professor Elizabeta Sheleva, PhD, President of the Managing Board of the Struga Poetry Evenings, said: “The poetry of Duffy is intertwined with sensible experiences and metaphysical observations on love, loss, moving, nostalgia, sorrow, memory, and transience of time (the end of youth, the death of the parents, the empty nest syndrome and the children leaving the home).
“Duffy’s poetry is lucid, sharp, authentic (and removed from current fads), weaved with a gender sensitive string, a spiritual deconstruction of gender forms and an unmasking of the gender asymmetry of power. She challenges the gender stereotypes as manipulative, and lends her mighty voice, her wittiness, insightfulness and joviality to the, until then, restrained, abandoned yet gifted women, trapped in the role of mute extras behind the scene of history.”
It is the latest accolade for Professor Duffy, who was UK Poet Laureate from 2009-19. She is the author of over 50 collections and has previously won the T.S Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize and Dylan Thomas Prize, among many awards. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999, and an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy in 2015, and awarded with a DBE in 2015 for services to poetry.
Professor Jess Edwards, Head of the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, said: “The Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath award is the latest indication of the truly global reputation of Carol Ann’s work.
