In May 2009, Carol Ann Duffy was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom — the first woman, and the first openly gay person, to hold the position. Duffy, born in Glasgow and based in Manchester, had for decades written poetry that placed the female body, female experience, and female perspectives at the centre of the British literary canon, explicitly challenging the masculine tradition of the Laureateship. Her appointment was widely seen as a cultural turning point for women in British public literary life.

Duffy's poetry — from The World's Wife (1999), in which famous women reclaim their stories, to Rapture (2005) — consistently addressed the female body as a site of pleasure, pain, and political meaning, in direct descent from the long tradition of women writing against bodily constraint. Her Laureateship gave this feminist bodily tradition an unprecedented public platform. The appointment was a symbolic culmination of the decades-long project of feminist poetry to move the female body from margin to centre.