Rats' Tales

Rats' Tales brings together a hugely entertaining, dark and magical cycle of folk tales from around the world. The volume contains two texts for each story: Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy's wonderful prose and Melly Still's lively dramatization. Rats' Tales celebrates the power of storytelling and will be published to coincide with the premiere at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in November 2012. On Beasts and Beauties, on which Carol Ann Duffy and Melly Still also collaborated: 'The first night audience did not exit from the theatre, they hover-crafted out of it on a balloon of bliss.' Independent

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow and grew up in Stafford. She won the 1993 Whitbread Award for Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Mean Time. The World's Wife received the E. M. Forster Award in America, while Rapture won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2005. She is currently Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her most recent volumes are New and Collected Poems for Children (2009) and The Bees (2011), which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her Collected Poems was published in 2015. She is Poet Laureate.