Carol Ann Duffy was born on December 23, 1955, in Glasgow, Scotland. When she was about five years old, she moved with her parents and younger brothers to Stafford, England, where her father took a position as a fitter with English Electric. The move to England would prove to have a profound effect on Duffy, who eventually attributed to it her sense of rootless existence and search for a new identity. Duffy's poem "Originally," published in The Other Country (1990), explores this theme, although it is only one of many that do.

Duffy attended grammar school in Stafford from 1962 to 1967 and then spent her middle school years at Saint Joseph's, a convent school, where she first learned to love poetry, both reading and writing it. Encouraged by an enthusiastic teacher, Duffy decided at age fourteen that she wanted to be a poet. From 1970 to 1974, she attended Stafford Girls' High School. Duffy's first small collection of poems, Fleshweathercock, and Other Poems, was published in 1973.

Duffy graduated from the University of Liverpool in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and worked various jobs while continuing to develop her poetry skills and to earn extra income from freelance writing. By 1982, she was working as a writer in residence in London's East End schools, where she was able to offer the same encouragement to young writers that she had been afforded in her middle and high school years. Also during this time, Duffy met Jackie Kay, the poet and writer who would become her life partner.

In 1986, Duffy's first full-length poetry collection, Standing Female Nude, won a Book Award from the Scottish Arts Council, and in 1989 Duffy received the Dylan Thomas Award. Throughout the 1990s, Duffy continued to have poetry published and to win awards. In 1995, Duffy gave birth to a daughter, and in 1996 she and Kay moved to Manchester, England, where Duffy accepted a part-time position teaching creative writing at the city's Metropolitan University.

Although she was considered a candidate for British poet laureate in 1999, Duffy was rejected at the time, presumably because of her unconventional lifestyle. As the lesbian daughter of a working-class Scotsman and raising a child with her black partner, Duffy was not quite what British government had in mind for its leading poet. Undaunted by the political snub, Duffy became one of Great Britain's most celebrated feminist poets. Her works include poetry for children as well as for adults. A volume of poetry for adults, Rapture, was published in 2005.

Duffy became Britain's Poet Laureate in 2009.