Wendy Cope

At Oxford University, Cope earned a BA in history and trained as a teacher, spending the next fifteen years working as a primary-school teacher. In 1981 she became Arts and Reviews editor for the Inner London Education Authority magazine, Contact. Five years later she became a freelance writer and was a television critic for The Spectator magazine until 1990. Five collections of her adult poetry have been published, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992), If I Don’t Know (2001), Family Values (2011), and Anecdotal Evidence (2018). She has also edited several anthologies of comic verse. Cope was appointed OBE in 2010 and in April 2011, the British Library purchased Cope’s archive including manuscripts, school reports and 40,000 emails, the largest email archive they have bought to date. The archive also includes 67 poetry notebooks and unpublished poems.