Maureen Duffy

For the contemporary British poet, see Carol Ann Duffy.

Maureen Patricia Duffy (born 21 Oct 1933 in Worthing, Sussex) is a contemporary British poet, playwright and novelist. She has also published a literary biography of Aphra Behn, and The Erotic World of Faery a book-length study of eroticism in faery fantasy literature.

Life and work

After a tough childhood, Duffy took her degree in English from King's College London. She also attended the secondary school Sarah Bonnell She went on to be a schoolteacher from 1956 to 1961, and edited three editions of a poetry magazine called the sixties. She then turned to writing full-time as a poet and playwright after being commissioned to produce a screenplay by Granada Television. Her first novel, written at the suggestion of a publisher, That's How It Was (1962), was published to great acclaim. Her first openly lesbian novel was The Microcosm (1966), set in the famous lesbian Gateways club in London.

To date she has published around thirty works, including five volumes of poetry. Her Collected Poems, 1949–84 appeared in 1985. Her work has often used Freudian ideas and Greek Myth as a framework.

Her novel The Gor Saga was televised in 1988 in a three part miniseries called First Born starring Charles Dance.^[1]

She is said to have been Britain's first lesbian to "come out" in public, and made public comments before the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts in 1967.^[2] In 1977 she published "The Ballad of the Blasphemy Trial", a broadside against the trial of the Gay News newspaper for 'blasphemous libel'.

She has been active in a variety of groups representing the interest of writers, and was at one time the President of the European Writers' Congress. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1985^[3] and awarded their Benson Medal in 2004.^[4] She is deeply interested in issues around enforcing traditional forms of intellectual property law.

She is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.

References

1. ^ Duffy, Maureen (October 1988). Gor Saga. Publisher: Arrow (A Division of Random House Group), (27 October 1988), ISBN 0-413-19760-3
2. ^ See the television programme "Late Night Lineup - "Man Alive", 14 June 1967, BBC Archive website.
3. ^ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. http://www.rslit.org/content/fellows. Retrieved 10 August 2010. 
4. ^ "Ms. Maureen Duffy". Debretts. http://www.debretts.com/people/biographies/browse/d/14761/Maureen%20Patricia+DUFFY.aspx. Retrieved 10 August 2010. 

Further reading

• Yorke, L. (1999). "British lesbian poetics: a brief exploration". Feminist Review; (62) Summer 1999, pp. 78–90.

External links

• Official website
• Maureen Duffy on the GLBTQ Encyclopedia
• A Duffy bibliography

Persondata
Name	Duffy, Maureen
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1933
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death