Success Quote by Carol Ann Duffy

Duffy’s line lands with the sly efficiency of someone who’s spent a lifetime watching “serious” culture sort itself into gendered bins. She praises women “winning things” in fiction, but the phrasing is doing double duty: it’s a nod to prizes as cultural oxygen and a quiet jab at how humiliating it is that women still need to “win” their way into visibility in a supposedly enlightened literary world. The word “things” matters, too - deliberately unspecific, as if to suggest the whole apparatus (reviews, advances, festival slots, canon-making) blurs into a single rigged game.

The pivot - “unlike poetry, which is more equal” - reads like a corrective and a provocation. Coming from a poet, it refuses the familiar story that poetry is simply more “pure” or less commercial; instead, it frames poetry as a space where gatekeeping has been less successfully naturalized. That’s both pride and warning. If poetry can be “more equal,” then fiction’s imbalance isn’t inevitable, it’s maintained.

Context sharpens the point. Duffy writes in the long afterlife of second-wave feminism, but also in the prize-era marketplace where cultural legitimacy is increasingly outsourced to juries and headlines. The quote doesn’t romanticize representation; it treats it as power. Women “winning” in fiction isn’t a feel-good milestone. It’s a measurable crack in a male-dominated pipeline that still decides whose stories get treated as universal and whose get shelved as niche.