Carol Ann Duffy

Appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009 - the first female in the role's 400 year history - Scottish poet Dame Carol Ann Duffy's combination of tenderness and toughness, humour and lyricism, unconventional attitudes and conventional forms, has earned her a very wide audience of readers and listeners.

She has won many awards including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the E. M. Forster Prize in America. She will be supported by LiTTLe MACHiNe, a South London band that gives new voice to poems both classic and obscure. Acoustic instruments, strong melodies and watertight harmonies create songs that draw on a thousand years of poetry from the Medieval to the Metaphysicals, the Romantics to the modern.