Ritual Lighting: Laureate Poems

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread and Forward Prizes, the PEN Pinter Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Prize for poetry, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. Her collections include The World's Wife, Love Poems, Rapture and The Bees which won the Costa Poetry Award.

Stephen Raw was born in London in 1952. He studied at Wimbledon and Ravensbourne Colleges of Art and Design, then at Manchester Metropolitan University for an MA. He has exhibited widely across the world. 'Fundamental to all my artwork,' Stephen says, 'is a love of language and how that language is given a visual dimension through those arbitrary signs we call letters - images in themselves.'