Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, the PEN Pinter Prize, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. Her other beautifully illustrated Christmas poems include Mrs Scrooge, Another Night Before Christmas, The Christmas Truce, Wenceslas, Bethlehem and The Wren-Boys. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. Her collections include The World's Wife, Love Poems, Rapture and The Bees which won the Costa Poetry Award.

Duffy's spellbinding verse, spiced with witty, wintry illustrations, recaptures a magic most of us left behind in childhood