The award-winning poet Wendy Cope will be reading at NAWE's Autumn Conference on the Saturday night (14 November 2009). A former teacher, Wendy shot to fame with her debut collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis.
Wendy Cope trained as a teacher at Westminster
College of Education, Oxford, and taught in primary schools in London
(1967-81 and 1984-6). She became Arts and Reviews editor for
Contact,
the Inner London Education Authority magazine, and continued to teach
part-time, before becoming a freelance writer in 1986. She was
television critic for
The Spectator magazine until 1990.
She
received a Cholmondeley Award in 1987 and was awarded the Michael
Braude Award for Light Verse (American Academy of Arts and Letters) in
1995. Her poetry collections include Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992) and If I Don't Know (2001), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. She has edited a number of poetry anthologies including The Orchard Book of Funny Poems (1993), Is That The New Moon? (1989), The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems (1998) and The Faber Book of Bedtime Stories (1999) and Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems (2001). She is also the author of two books for children, Twiddling Your Thumbs (1988) and The River Girl (1991).
Wendy
Cope is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in
Winchester, England. In 1998 she was the listeners' choice in a BBC
Radio 4 poll to succeed Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate.
Her latest book, Two Cures for Love (2008) is a selection of previous poems with notes, together with new poems.
Photo: © Caroline Forbes
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