Client details

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.