Wendy Cope
Author
Agent
Associate Agent
Biography
Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent in 1945 and read History at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She trained as a teacher at Westminster College of Education, Oxford and taught in primary shools in London. 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 is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Winchester. In l998 she was the listeners’ choice in a BBC Radio 4 poll to succeed Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate. She received a Cholmondeley Award in1987 and was awarded the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse in 1995.
Publications
Poetry
Selected Poems
In her first collection of new poetry since 2011’s acclaimed Family Values, Wendy Cope celebrates ‘the half-forgotten stories of our lives’ with compassion, wisdom and wit. Cope continues to be the most generous of authors, sharing her experience of childhood and marriage and writing poignantly about the passing of time. In several of the poems she reimagines Shakespeare in unorthodox fashion; in others she offers heartfelt tributes to friends and to public figures including Eric Morecambe and John Cage.
From a motorway service area to her ambivalent relationship with religion.
Shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award
Children's
Poems for Children
Non-Fiction
Wendy Cope has long been one of the nation’s best-loved poets, with her sharp eye for human foibles and wry sense of humour. For the first time, Life, Love and the Archers brings together the best of her prose – recollections, reviews and essays from the light-hearted to the serious, taken from a lifetime of published and unpublished work, and all with Cope’s lightness of touch.
Here readers can meet the Enid-Blyton-obsessed schoolgirl, the ambivalent daughter, the amused teacher, the sensitive journalist, the cynical romantic and the sardonic television critic, as well as touching on books and writers who have informed a lifetime of reading and writing.
Wendy Cope is a master of the one-liner as well as the couplet, the telling review as well as the sonnet, and Life, Love and the Archers gives us a wonderfully entertaining and unforgettable portrait of one of England’s favourite writers.
A book for anyone who’s ever fallen in love, tried to give up smoking, or consoled themselves that they’ll never be quite as old as Mick Jagger.
