Costa Poetry Award Winner 2011

About the book:

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy's first collection of new poems as Poet Laureate and finds Duffy using her full poetic range. There are drinking songs, love poems, poems to the weather, poems of political anger - there are elegies, too, for beloved friends and most movingly, the poet's own mother. As Duffy's voice rises in this collection, her music intensifies and every poem patterns itself into song. Weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee. In the end, Duffy's point is clear: the bee symbolizes what we have left of grace in the world, and what is most precious and necessary for us to protect.

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow and read philosophy at Liverpool University.

Her adult poetry collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Other Country (1990), Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year), The World’s Wife (1999), Feminine Gospels (2002), and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. She has also won the Lannan Literary Award and the E. M. Forster Prize in America.

Carol Ann Duffy has won the Signal Prize for Children’s Verse and she also writes picture books for children including Underwater Farmyard, Moon Zoo and The Princess's Blankets. She has written three Christmas poetry books: Mrs Scrooge, Another Night Before Christmas and The Christmas Truce and has edited several poetry anthologies. She is also an acclaimed playwright and has had plays performed at the The Young Vic, Liverpool Playhouse, and Bristol Old Vic.

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester and is Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester.

Metropolitan University. She became Poet Laureate in 2009, the first woman to hold the post, and was awarded an OBE in 1995, a CBE in 2001 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

What the judges said:

“We were thrilled by the poet’s musical feeling for language and her spellbinding ability to combine naturalness and formal complexity. It’s a joyful collection.”

“The Costa Book Awards have an excellent track record of recognising and celebrating some of the very best current British writing, and books that can be enjoyed by everyone,” said John Derkach, Managing Director, Costa. “We’re very proud to be announcing such a terrific collection of books which we know people will enjoy reading.”

The five Costa Book Award winners, each of whom will receive £5,000, were selected from 568 entries. The five books are now eligible for the ultimate prize - the 2011 Costa Book of the Year.

The winner, selected by a panel of judges chaired by Editor of the London Evening Standard, Geordie Greig and comprising Hugh Dennis, Dervla Kirwan, Mary Nightingale, William Fiennes, Flora Fraser, Patrick Gale, Jojo Moyes and Eleanor Updale, will be announced at an awards ceremony hosted by presenter and broadcaster Penny Smith at Quaglino’s in central London on Tuesday 24th January 2012.

Since the introduction of the Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won nine times by a novel, four times by a first novel, five times by a biography, seven times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book. The 2010 Costa Book of the Year was Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott.