Task 3
Questions 11-15
Read the text below.
For questions 11-15, write one or two words, or a number.
Write your answers on the lines below the text.
There is an example at the beginning (0).
A Poet's Life
Lillian Parkin was born in 1941 in Coventry to a postman and his stay-at-home wife, of whom Parkin was later to say ‘my mother’s talents were wholly wasted in boring domestic life.’Parkin graduated from Oxford University with first class honours in English Literature. She considered doing doctoral studies, but for financial reasons, ended up in journalism, and then became a schoolteacher in Ipswich.
Her first collection, Dark Magic, came out in 1966 to immediate praise. The original title had been Light Magic but she changed it on the recommendation of her then husband, the poet Ted Duhig. When Duhig died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, Parkin left Ipswich and school teaching, and settled in South London as a full-time poet, memoirist, and journalist.
Freed from the demands of school life, her creative output exploded. Seven more collections followed, including So What?, which was nominated for the National Prize, and, in 1982, Who’s Next?, which won the Whitbread Prize. Parkin was also successful as a journalist, earning her a reputation as a sharp critic of the social and cultural movements which shaped the times.
In 1986 she moved to Cornwall, ‘tired of life in the great city,’ as she recorded in one of her many memoirs. She lives there with her third husband, their six cats, two parrots, and a tarantula called Neil.