Mon 7 July 2025
News
NAWE aims to put creativity at the heart of education. NAWE is a charity funded largely by its members fees and donations.
You are here: Home > News > Wendy Cope at the NAWE Conference
Wendy Cope at the NAWE Conference
Fri 1 May 2009
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



Conference proposals are currently invited, with a deadline of 31 May. The full Conference programme will be published in July.

Click here for further details and booking information.


Contact Information:
Organisation:
National Association of Writers in Education
Contact Name:
Gill Greaves
Contact Email:
g.greaves@nawe.co.uk